


Fate-Spurned

by tfm



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Background Relationships, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 13:18:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 42,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18499762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: If Vax was fate-touched, then she, perhaps, was fate-spurned.Or:Prologue: Before SyngornI: Before Vox MachinaII: During Vox MachinaIII: Fulfilling a deal with the Raven QueenIV: A little way down the road





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of things I want to say about the way Vex's story played out in-game, but instead of listening to me bitch, have a forty-thousand word fanfiction. Not betaed because I'm lazy.

It was a bright day in Byroden the day Elaina Matheson gave birth. The people in town had been naturally curious regarding the parentage of her child, given that she was unmarried, and had no frequent suitors to speak of. That the timing of her pregnancy had coincided with the visit of the delegation from Syngorn had escaped the notice of many, save for the most eagle-eyed.

They could hardly not realize, when the children came into the world – twins, born twelve minutes apart, both with dark hair and pointed ears. The story spread through scuttlebutt; not out of malice, but out of curiosity, that Elaina had been visited by Syldor Vessar, Syngornian Ambassador to Emon, after he had torn his traveling cloak on the journey to Byroden.

It had been late at night; the traveling party had been waylaid by bandits, and would be leaving at cock’s crow the next morning. Elaina was not entirely sure why she had answered the door, long after her shop had closed, but doing so had changed the fate of many, though she would never know it.

She knew that Syldor’s last name had been Vessar, and that he was an Ambassador from Syngorn, but that was the extent of her knowledge regarding her children’s father. 

The names she had chosen sounded suitably elvish, she thought. They were elegant, and respectable, and would go further than being just the children of a mere seamstress.

There were a fair number of half-elves in Byroden, which meant that they had never been looked poorly upon for being different, or, for that matter, for being bastards. Moreover, they were seen as a charming curiosity, more-so for having been twins. They were not rich, or even what most people would have considered scraping by. It was difficult, after all, to raise two children on the salary of a seamstress, without a father to speak of.

Elaina didn’t mind. They scraped by well enough; there was always food on the table, even if some weeks she had to go hunting to put food on the table. Her father, long dead, had taught her how to fire a bow, how to skin a kill with a blade, and they were skills that she was determined to pass down to her children. If nothing else, they would be self-sufficient, the way she had learned to be.

They were spirited children, and though it was a descriptor that Elaina had applied herself, it always made her laugh. Her mother had always said that calling your children “spirited” was another way of saying that they were difficult to handle, and that wasn’t true at all.

Well, mostly not true.

Vax’ildan, for his part, was always getting into things that he shouldn’t, running off into the woods without her to more closely examine something he had seen.

Vex’ahlia was forever negotiating; whether or not she had to go to school this week, whether or not it was time for bed, whether they could go off into the woods next morning.

But, they were both curious, and intelligent, and very, very protective of each other. Vex’ahlia had nearly screamed the entire forest down, the day Vax’ildan fell out of a tree and broken his arm, and he had responded in kind when she had gotten lost in said forest.

Residents of and visitors to the town alike were taken by them, with their mischievousness and their kindheartedness. One such visitor was perhaps a little bit too curious. At first, Elaina paid the Elven man no mind. He had long, red hair, and dressed in expensive Syngornian armor, made from fine studded leather. 

While Elves were not omnipresent visitors to Byroden, neither were they uncommon. Many travelers used the village as a place to stay the night, before starting the arduous journey through the Verdant Expanse. More still came to hunt in the lands surrounding the Gladepools, and often came to Byroden to trade their kills, rather than making the arduous trek back to Syngorn.

The man gave strange looks to Elaina, and to the two half-elven children tugging at her skirts, begging to be allowed to run off and play before dinner.

‘Your children,’ the man said. He lowered the knife he had been cleaning in the creek, diluted tendrils of blood washing downstream. ‘Where’s their father?’

‘He died,’she said, simply. She had practiced the tale a hundred times over the years, hoping never to need to use it. ‘He was killed by bandits on the way to Wildemount to trade silks.’ The lie rolled off her tongue so easily. She had no doubt that if Syldor knew of his childrens’ existence, he would come looking for them. Even from their brief encounter, she knew that he was not the sort of man to let such things go unattended to.

‘An elf?’

She nodded. That much, at least, she couldn’t hide. Their pointed ears and their lithe frames could only be the result of elvish blood. ‘From Lyrengorn.’

He seemed surprised at that. ‘Didn’t think there were many elves that left Lyrengorn,’ he said, which was exactly the reason that Elaina had chosen Lyrengorn. There would be fewer people that would be able to dispute the story.

Elaina gave a helpless sort of shrug, as though she was just a pathetic sort of widow that didn’t know all that much about her late husband. ‘If you’ll forgive me,’ she said, ‘I have work to get done. Safe travels back to Syngorn.’

She thought, perhaps, that that would be the last of it. Or that perhaps she should disguise the children in some way, in case other curious elves started asking questions. It would be easy enough to cut their hair in a way that covered their ears. Vax was very proud of his long, dark locks, and would be upset to lose them, but the alternative was much worse.

She had almost forgotten about the encounter until a month or so later, when, there was a knock on the door. Both the children were at school, or it least, they were supposed to be. Every now and then, she got word that they had skipped class, to go hunting, or explore the woods, or do other things that she would prefer not to know about.

The night she had spent with Syldor was a distant memory, and were it not for her children, she would not have been able to pick him out from a row of other dark-haired elves. But when she looked upon him, she saw the bright mirth of Vax’s eyes, the stern look that often crossed Vex’s face, the skin not quite as pale as his, and dark hair that his children had both inherited.

Elaina’s heart sank.

‘I think you know why I’m here,’ Syldor said.


	2. I.

I.

Vex’ahlia and Vax’ildan’s lives changed forever the day a dark-haired elven stranger came knocking on the front door.

They hadn’t been home at the time, taking advantage of the brief break they had between school finishing and dinner to go hunting in the woods. It was an unlucky sort of day; there was hardly any game to begin with, and the few arrows that Vex fired missed badly, leaving them both grumpy as they returned.

Before she had even set foot through the door, Vex knew that something was different. The horse saddled out the front was unfamiliar, and adorned with expensive looking saddlery. The harness alone could have fetched a fair price at market. Vex had accompanied Elaina enough to the markets, buying silks, and furs, and other kinds of textiles, to know the value of things. Vax, of course, preferred to spend his time watching people; watching the way they walked, where they put their money bags. He had never taken anything – not since mother had nearly tanned his hide for stealing silverware from a traveling merchant. 

She hadn’t actually hit him – she had never raised a hand to either of them – but the yelling felt like it had lasted hours, and an abashed Vax had been force to return the things he had taken. The lesson he had learned was perhaps not the one that their mother had been trying to teach. He hadn’t learned “don’t steal,” but he had learned “don’t steal from anyone who can’t afford to lose what you’re taking.” Steal from someone that had so much they didn’t notice you’d stolen anything at all.

The man sitting at their small kitchen table looked out of place. A look of barely concealed disgust crossed his face at the threadbare rug, and the preserved meats hanging from the ceiling, and the wood that was slightly rotting in places.

He stood as they entered, much taller than mother, and long, dark hair that was half-braided down his back. He looked a bit like Vax, and, Vex supposed, a bit like her as well. Before she even had time to think about who he was, or what he was doing there, their mother spoke.

‘Vax’ildan, Vex’ahlia, this is Syldor. He’s from Syngorn.’ There was a long sort of pause. ‘He’s your father.’

Both Vax and Vex straightened suddenly, in surprise. They had asked questions about their father, of course, but it was a subject that Elaina had always avoided. It wasn’t until years later that Vex realized that their mother hadn’t wanted them to know much, in case people started asking questions. Wasn’t until years later that she heard the story of the Elven hunter that noticed them, and relayed news of their existence back to Syldor. It certainly hadn’t been nostalgia of the woman he had left behind that brought him back.

He barely had eyes for their mother, and Vex felt a bit insulted on her behalf. It was not, after all, as though she was a complete stranger. 

He looked them over, obviously with judging eyes. Vex felt like she was some kind of show dog, having points taken away for minor infractions. ‘I suppose they look healthy enough,’ he said, after several long minutes. His eyes took in Vex’s oft-mended tunic, and Vax’s patched leather shoes. A look of repressed disgust crossed his eyes. ‘Do they have any skills?’

“Getting on my nerves,” Mother might have said, on any other day. She did like to tease them, about how often they managed to get themselves into trouble, but, as Vex argued, they were also quite good at getting themselves out of trouble. ‘They come hunting with me,’ she said instead. ‘Vax is very good at sneaking up on animals, and Vex is a good shot with the bow. They both help with my work sometimes, too.’ The disgust didn’t quite fade.

‘Well, in Syngorn, they’ll have people to to do that for them,’ he mused, as though to himself. ‘They have experience with weapons though, that’s something at least.’ He sighed, as though their very existence was a burden to him. Vex soon realized that that was probably the case. He didn’t want to be there any more than they wanted him there.

He did not care to stay in their house, and had booked a room in the only inn in town. Not grand, by any means, but much fancier than their humble abode. ‘I’ll leave you to tell them,’ he said, in a careless sort of way. ‘I will be collecting them in the morning.’

Collecting them? Vex thought to herself. What on Exandria did that mean?

Vex shared a worried look with her brother. She didn’t care whether this man was their father, or anyone else. She didn’t like the sound of “collecting.” 

Syldor left, with an arrogant swish of his cloak, and Vex and Vax turned towards their mother.

‘What’s going on?’ Vex asked, bluntly. She’d never quite been one for subtlety. They sat down together at the small, wooden table. Mother’s eyes were wet with tears. She let them eat the honeyed candies they had bought at the town festival, weeks ago.

‘Your father,’ she told them, ‘Is going to take you to live with him in Syngorn.’

Vex said nothing, processing the words. She didn’t particularly want to go to Syngorn – a place she had heard of, but knew absolutely nothing about. As always, Vax was living inside her head.

‘What if we don’t want to go?’ he asked, stubbornly. Vex supported him with a glare, and tightly folded arms.

Elaina gave them a serious sort of look. ‘I would much rather you stay,’ she admitted, her voice quavering. ‘But Syldor is...he lives a much nicer life than we do here. You wouldn’t have to worry about hunting for food, or gathering firewood in the winter. You can live a normal life.’

They were already living a normal life, Vex wanted to argue. They were happy enough where they were. 

There were better opportunities for them in Syngorn, Mother told them. They would be able to grow up and be more than just a hunter, or a merchant, or a seamstress. They could be diplomats, or scholars. Vex shared a look with her brother. No-one in their right minds would make either of them a diplomat.

The “discussion” continued well into the night, though it soon became clear that no matter what either of them said, they would not be able to change their mother’s mind.

‘We’ll be able to come back and visit though, right?’ Vex asked. She didn’t want to go to Syngorn if it meant not seeing Mother again. It didn’t occur to her that it would be the last time that they saw each other.

‘Of course,’ Mother said, through a teary smile.

That was the day that their lives changed forever. If Syldor hadn’t taken them, they would have been in Byroden when Thordak attacked. They would have died like their mother. But then, that was something that they didn’t learn until years later.

Syldor took them through a path in the Verdant Expanse – the furtherest either of them had ever been into the dark forest. He blatantly ignored their pleas to stay, and they felt like nothing more than prisoners as they marched towards Syngorn.

Syldor could scarcely fail to notice their whispered discussions behind him, as they debated whether it would be worthwhile to simply just run away back to Byroden. He would know, of course, exactly where they were going. Not to mention that Mother wouldn’t be particularly please.

There was a part of Vex that didn’t quite mind the idea of living in a nice house, with nice clothes, and nice food to eat. People didn’t exactly look down on them in Byroden, but there was certainly no small amount of pity. She would rather people look at her and be impressed, or inspired.

She was quite excited, then, when Syldor took them to a tailor before anywhere else. Admittedly, he took several glances around, before ushering them inside, as though he was worried about being seen with two peasant children.

They were fitted for more kinds of clothes than Vex had ever heard of, even growing up with a seamstress for a mother. This was not the kind of business that Mother ran; mother didn’t have large, ornate harps playing by themselves in a corner, or a waterfall centerpiece in the heart of the chamber, or rooms upon rooms of expensive silks, and fine leathers, and soft furs. Syldor and the tailor made snide comments about their pinched appearance, as though they weren’t even in the room.

‘I would have thought it above you to associate with riff-raff,’ the tailor said, jokingly. Syldor didn’t laugh, and Vex gave the other elf a hard stare. He looked at her, as though he dared her to say something. Before she could, though, Sylder was speaking.

‘Well, no matter where they came from, I’m sure we can make something of them,’ he said, with a sigh, as though he was working on a difficult puzzle that he wasn’t sure of the answer to. Vex had seen the same look on Vax’s face, when he tried to pick a stubborn lock, had felt it cross her own face, when she missed an easy shot on a grazing deer. 

Inconvenience.

Inconvenient that their mother had ever given birth to them. Inconvenient that they were now forced upon him, that he had to feed, and clothe, and teach them.

He wasn’t outright neglectful. They were at least well-fed, and well-clothed, and always had access to the things that they needed. At most, she supposed his attitude was one of indifference. He didn’t particularly care what they did, as long as they didn’t embarrass him while they did it.

Instead, they were stuck in elven classrooms, struggling to learn Elven and Abyssal. There were other things that they had been taught; both she and Vax took tutelage from a weaponmaster. Not because their father had anything particularly special planned for them. On the contrary, he tended to keep his distance for the most part, leaving their upbringing to tutors and nannies. No, they trained because it was expected of them. Because it was what every other Syngornian citizen did. The sad thing was, Vex desperately wanted to do a good job. She wanted to be able to show father her wonderful marks, and have him say “Well done, I’m proud of you.” She wanted him to brag about them to his friends in the Syngornian book club, where the only book they ever read was called “How to be a Fucking Dickhead.” Then, she remembered that none of them would ever need to read that book, because they already knew how.

So she studied hard, and worked hard, and got good grades, and did well in her weapons lessons. She went from missing nine shots out of ten, to hitting the bulls-eye every time. Of course, it was only from thirty feet away, but still, she was proud of what she had accomplished. Not that Syldor ever noticed. He was too busy with his ambassadorial duties to notice the things they did well, and yet he always managed to start paying attention when they got into trouble.

Still, the weapons training was one of the few things about living in Syngorn that Vex could look back and feel somewhat pleased about; picking up a bow, and feeling the rush of adrenaline in her fingers as she pulled back the string.

The weapon-masters built on what their mother had taught them, teaching Vex to shoot a target from a hundred and fifty feet, taught Vax to throw daggers from the shadows.

When they weren’t in lessons, or in weapons training, Vex kept to the tops of trees, watching. She saw the lips of other nobles curl into words like “peasants, and half-breeds, and bastards,” unaware of eyes listening from a distance. Those were the nicer of the insults. The one that Vex had particularly hated was “ill-born.”

As though their entire existence was merely some sort of mistake. Surely their father had thought that way. He had told them often enough that he didn’t want any blood of his, bastards or not, brought up as peasants. He said that word, “peasants” often enough that Vex started to internalize it. Started to believe, almost, that he had taken them away from something horrible, and brought them to...No. That wasn’t it at all. She would have lived in Byroden in poverty in a second, instead of living in Syngorn with lavish surroundings.

Vax, for his part, took great pleasure in taking advantage of these lavish surroundings. By the time they had been there six months, he had managed to gain entry into most of the buildings in the diplomatic quarter, relieving them of minor trinkets that they wouldn’t miss. He was caught, once or twice, but since unlike Vex, he cared very little about what Syldor thought, the punishments inflicted upon him were meaningless. He hid the things he had stolen underneath his mattress until they found a way they could sell them.

There was something of a criminal underground that thrived, but none that would willingly sell to the son of an Ambassador. It took Vex several months of cajoling, and negotiating just to get them an audience with a shadowy figure in the Linens Guild. In the end, the gold they got was less than what Syldor – she couldn’t bear to call him Father – gave them as allowance, but it was the principle of the thing. As though they were making their own, silent protest against the stuffy, racist Elves that lived there. One stuffy, racist Elf in particular.

It was Syldor’s indifference that was the main motivator for Vex to spend as much time away from Syngorn as possible. One small saving grace of the place was that it was absolutely surrounded by forest and mountains. You barely had to walk ten minutes before you were surrounded by wilderness.

Of course, there were Elven eyes always watching. They both took it as a personal sort of mission to try and sneak through without anyone detecting them. Vax, though, had always been much better at it.

He had been a little less enthusiastic about the idea of wandering around the Verdant Expanse, but he did it for her sake. He was a little more comfortable in buildings, and around other people, around places where he could slip his hands into places they weren’t supposed to be, and tiptoe quietly along back alleyways. Vex, on the contrary, preferred to have grass underneath her feet, wide branches over her head. Well, no, that wasn’t true. More than anything else, she preferred Byroden; a town, yes, but small enough that it wasn’t too hard to get away from. The people were friendly, and mother was there, a smile on her face, and a bright twinkle in her eye. Every now and then, Vex caught a similar expression on Vax’s face, usually as he was about to do something that could get him into a lot of trouble.

It was nice to get away from the passive-aggressive looks, and the paternal indifference. Nice for it to be just them, alone in the woods.

She took the bow that father had commissioned her for her birthday. Or rather, the bow that one of the servants had commissioned, and father had taken credit.

It was a fine bow, of elven craftsmanship, that was no doubt intended solely for target practice within the boundaries of Syngorn. Vax had received an ornate set of silver daggers, that he had wasted no opportunity in trying to hit a target just above Vex’s head. That had culminated in an increasingly drastic contest ending only when Vex’s ear was almost taken off by what Vax claimed to be a change in the wind. After that, they didn’t practice on each other with their real weapons.

They used them on targets, and on animals in the woods if they were staying for longer than a few hours, but if they sparred, they used the marginally safer wooden training weapons. The last thing either of them wanted to do was hurt each other.

They kept off the trail, as they always did, knowing that if they ran into Syngornian guards, father would find out. Not that it mattered. He would punish them for embarrassing him, and they would go and do the same thing next week anyway. There was always the risk that they would run into more dangerous things; stranded fey folk, or raiders from Ruhn-Shak, or even the woods themselves, they had heard. 

Every time, they went a little bit further, seeking a safe passage away from Syngorn, and towards their freedom. For as much as Vex craved her father’s approval, she would have much preferred being in Byroden, with their mother. Their mother, who didn’t make them scratch and claw and fight for the smallest amount of praise, who taught them what she knew, and helped them grow without belittling them.

In time, Vex’s desire for her father’s approval faded, as it became adamantly clear that it would not be forthcoming. Even if he did approve of anything they did, it wasn’t as though he would ever tell them.

Things continued in much the same way for almost four years. They asked their father weekly when they could return to Byroden, even just to visit mother. Next month, he would say, but then next month would come, and Syldor would have forgotten ever having promised. He turned a blind eye to both their misdeeds, and their misfortunes.

Vax took their predicament a little more in stride than she did. Vex got the feeling that he would have stayed in Syngorn, if a little begrudgingly, had she not expressed her desire to leave. He was perfectly content with his minor criminal enterprise. ‘Father wouldn’t notice for days,’ she whispered to him, under her breath at the back of the classroom. It was a little bit of an exaggeration. Someone would notice fairly quickly, and tell their father, even if he didn’t notice himself.

Eventually, Vax acquiesced, though Vex knew from the moment that she first brought it up, that he would come with her. If she said that she was going to jump off a cliff, he would have done that with her, too. In spite of their differences, they did near everything together, which she supposed was just another reason why the denizens of Syngorn looked down on them. Whispering to each other at the back of the classroom, or talking about the latest gossip they’d overheard instead of doing their target practice. Children were not common in Syngorn, and twins even less so.

It was a cool autumn day when they finally made their move. They had finished their lessons, and were supposed to be scheduled for a quiet reflection time, which generally involved walking through the forest peacefully, or as Vex liked to call it “elves being pretentious dickheads” time.

‘You know,’ Vax would always say, ‘That implies that sometimes they’re not pretentious dickheads.’

He always knew how to make her laugh. He always knew how to make her angry, or frustrated, too, but he didn’t do that quite as much.

They had stayed up past midnight for the last few nights in a row, planning and preparing their escape. Their rucksacks were packed, but not so much as to look suspicious. They had stolen food and ale, but not so much that it would go noticed. Vax, at least, was very good at stealing things in such a way that no-one ever noticed.

They marched resolutely to the city gates, packs high on their shoulders. This was part of the plan that they had spent the longest time discussing.

Vex thought it was important that someone see them leave the city, that Syldor should know that they had gone on purpose. Vax preferred the idea of simply disappearing without a trace.

‘As much as I hate father,’ Vex said, in urgent whispers. ‘He’ll look for us longer if he thinks something might have happened to us. If he knows we left of our own accord, he might give up.’ It was something of a pipe dream, but she had managed to convince Vax in the end.

The guards were suspicious, and they had every right to be. After all, Syldor Vassar's wayward twins were walking into the Verdant Expanse, dressed for travel, and armed with what Vex was just now beginning to realize were mere childrens’ toys.

What they should have done was go to the Syngorn Armory first, and stolen proper weapons. But, it was too late now, as Vex used every ounce of her charm to explain to the guards that her father had given the two of them permission to spend the night in the woods to reconnect with nature.

‘I’ll have to go and confirm that,’ the guard said, a little hesitantly. Vex pressed her advantage.

‘Oh, he’s in a very important meeting right now with the Ambassador from Emon. He’d be very upset if he was interrupted. He gave us this to ensure we had no trouble from the guards.’ She handed him a wrought iron crest that Vax had stolen from father’s desk. She didn’t know if it had any significant meaning, but the guard’s opinion seemed to be shifting in her favor. He seemed caught between not wanting to let them out, and not wanting to get in trouble for letting them out. Finally, he conceded. 

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘But don’t go getting yourselves killed.’ After all, he couldn’t very well be expecting that they were running away. At worst, he would have thought that they were sneaking out to do things in the woods that were frowned upon, as so many of the full-elven children did, like drinking mulled wine, and smoking things that could only be found in Syngorn’s more shadowy corners.

The twins had never been invited to those gatherings. Actually, no, that was a lie, Vex remembered. They’d been invited to one, and they had gone, with some trepidation, hoping it meant that some people actually wanted to be friends with them. Their concerns had been warranted; their peers had taken it as an opportunity to mock them to their face, and treat it all as some big joke that a couple of half-elven brats were even allowed to set foot in Syngorn.

They had left in the dead of the night, and cut down the rope ladders that hung from the branches, leaving a bunch of pretentious elven dickheads trapped in the treetops. It would not take them that long to get down, of course, and both Vex and Vax knew that they would suffer for it in the long run, but it had felt good.

The tricks the other children played were cruel, and destructive. Nothing like the harmless pranks that she and Vax traded back and forth. Pranks that all but ceased during their time in Syngorn; it was more important that they watch their own backs.

The worst of it had been a Firebolt spell, shot towards her painstakingly completed Abyssal homework from a distance, turning pages of careful runework into ash. She had gotten into trouble both for the missing homework, and for the fight that ensued between two feeble teenagers that barely had enough strength to lift a shortsword.

It had ended with Vex, bruised, bloody and singed, sitting in Syldor’s office, being given the third degree, as though the unprovoked attack had somehow been her fault. She took the punishment without arguing, and then went and re-hemmed all of Syldor’s robes in the dead of night. She and Vax smirked over breakfast the next day; Syldor didn’t even notice the way his robes were trailing an inch or so longer than usual. It wasn’t much, but it was enough that the robe would scuff against the pavement with every step that he took. There was also, of course, the off chance that he might trip over them, but that was too much to hope for.

The next day, the girl that had shot the Firebolt at her came to school without any shoes. Apparently, all of her shoes had mysteriously vanished in the night. Vex had given her brother a thankful sort of nudge, and that had been that.

They walked all afternoon, and well into the night. Vex knew that if Syldor sent anyone looking for them, he would expect them to stop to sleep, to rest, and that was exactly why they shouldn’t. They had to be well out of Syngorn by the next morning.

Syldor would be expecting them to go South West, towards Byroden. Though it pained Vex, and it certainly pained Vax, even though he didn’t say anything, she instead took them on a meandering northward path, carefully avoiding The Shifting Keep, and melting into the shadows whenever they heard something that might have been an Elven Scout. After a day or so, they moved upwards into the Stormcrest Mountains. Though they were both quite fit, spending most of their time when not in Syngorn roaming the Verdant Expanse, the uphill trek had Vex and Vax sweating, and aching and swearing within hours of their first day in the mountains. 

They camped in the trees for the first night, sparse though they were on the mountainside. As they moved deeper into the Stormcrest Mountains, there were fewer and fewer trees, and as a result, less and less cover.

‘I think we should move back into the forest,’ Vax said, after the third day of this. Vex agreed. They had stolen bread, and ale, and rations enough for a few days, but soon she would have to start hunting again, and the pickings in the mountains were quite slim. Moreover, she did not want to head too deep into the Expanse. That way lay danger.

They had both studied maps in Syngorn, under the guise of wanting to learn more about the geography of Tal’Dorei. Even still, it was a large continent, and they had never been particularly good students. She knew that if they kept heading East, they would end up in the Frostweald, which neither of them wanted. They had not packed for winter, and the Frostweald was shrouded in an eternal...well, frost. South would take them back to Syngorn, which was obviously not ideal. North would keep them going through the mountains. Their best option, they decided, would be West until they got out of the mountains, and then North through to the Dividing Plain.

The Wildwood Byway, was, of course, the most direct way to do this, but Vex was sure that Syldor would have scouts along the road, looking for them. They had both heard tales of people getting lost in the woods after going off the trail. The trees were so thick, and the forest so large, that so many had never been found.

This proved to be a harder endeavor than either of them had expected. While Vex was well used to using her surroundings to navigate, the canopy was dense enough that for the most part, the sun was hidden from her view. She had stolen a navigation stone from Syldor’s study – they had both seen him use it to find his way on long travels before, but, as Vex soon discovered, its use was limited.

‘We can use it to find north, but that’s about it,’ Vex said, after spending a few moments studying the stone.

‘Well, it’s a good thing we want to go north, then,’ Vax said, cheerfully. Vex rolled her eyes, and gave her brother a wink. It was good to be away from Syngorn with just him. Her best friend, her closest – or only – confidant. She couldn’t imagine what she would do without him in her life. She wasn’t sure if she would have had the courage to leave Syngorn on her own.

After a few days of traveling, they had settled into a rhythm. Vax would move ahead, slowly, carefully, checking for any unexpected guests on their path. If the way was clear, he would make an animal noise – an owl, or a wolf, or something that would not be out of place in their surroundings – and Vex would move forward.

It was not a fast way to travel, but that was not the only reason Vex didn’t like it. She preferred to have Vax at her side, where she could see him, talk to him, touch him. 

It was both a blessing and a curse when they finally made it out of the Verdant Expanse. Blessing, because there was no longer any point to sneaking ahead. Curse, because they were no out in open country, with no means of keeping hidden as they traveled. 

For a couple of days, they sequestered themselves in a cave on the edge of the mountains, resting, and discussing their options.

Eventually, they knew, they wanted to go back to Byroden. That wasn’t even one of the things up for discussion, merely something that they both accepted as a given. The problem was, though, they would have to wait long enough for Syldor to give up on them.

Really, he had probably given up on them from the moment he’d met them. He couldn’t possibly think that his low-born, half-elven children would ever amount to much. That said, the fact that he wanted to keep them under a close watch, meant that they needed to get as far away from Syngorn – and Byroden – as possible.

The smart move, of course, would be to travel well out of his reach, across the Lucidian Ocean and into Wildemount, or across the Ozmit Sea to Issylra. Vax had a strange fascination with the idea of going to Vasselheim, which should have surprised Vex, but didn’t. More than once, she had seen him slip away for a quiet moment in the Reverie Walks. She didn’t know who he was praying to, but it seemed to bring him comfort. She would have joined him, if she’d had anyone to pray to.

They continued to meander north, stopping outside of towns to camp for the evening. Vex was hesitant about setting foot in; they were still dressed in Syngornian garb, though much of it was seeing the wear of the road.

It was the clothes – the stupid fucking Syngornian clothes – that almost became Vex’s downfall a week or so later, when they were camped out not far from Kymal. Vax was off doing what he always did – selling what he had stolen, and stealing a little more to get them a little more gold in the next town.

What happened next was a stupid, avoidable sort of thing that she knew would haunt her for the rest of her life. The sort of thing that was impossible to explain away. Well, she could, at the very least, avoid telling him about the two people she had killed. The bear cub sleeping by the fire would be a little harder to explain.

When Vax returned, it was after dark. He gave a low bird call to let her know it was him, and not a sleazy poacher looking to kidnap and sell her. His footsteps were so soft these days that Vex rarely heard his actual approach. This time, though she almost heard him stop in his tracks, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, staring pointedly at the brown bear cub that was dozing by the fire.

Vex feigned ignorance. ‘Over the fire?’ she asked, innocently. ‘That’s dinner, Vax. Unless you’re not hungry.’ On the way back, she had spotted a small deer that she had taken out with a lucky shot. She wasn’t entirely sure how much bears ate, but she didn’t think it would be a trivial amount. The cub’s dead mother had been enormous, and she hadn’t gotten there from eating grass. 

He had been weak enough when she found him, that he didn’t protest when she had removed the thick chain from around his neck, and had weakly sipped at the water she had found him. She generally preferred to keep her distance from bears, as they moved quickly, and were resilient enough that a couple of arrows wouldn’t be enough to take them down. She was fairly certain, though, that this one was underweight, for what a cub of his age should have been. He would no doubt be starving, and if he ate too much, it wouldn’t be good for him. They would have to put the weight back on him slowly.

‘No, I mean...that,’ he said, pointing definitively at the cub. Vex shrugged.

‘You’re always off finding trinkets of your own, well I wanted one of my own.’ She didn’t explain where she had found the bear, or the events that had preceded her rescue. Vax didn’t need to know that. He worried about her enough as it was.

Vax shook his head. ‘What do you want with a bear, Vex’ahlia? It’s not as though you can bring it with us when we go from town to town.’

‘Well I’ll just stay outside of town then,’ she told him, defiantly. ‘After all, I need the company when you wander off into cities to “procure” things.’

‘You’re always welcome to come with me, you know that.’

Vex shook her head. It wasn’t that she didn’t like towns. It was just...They were scraggly teenagers, wearing fine clothes over the top of underthings that had been mended a dozen times or more. They had both learned to sew under their mother’s careful tutelage, and when you didn’t have much gold to spare, you didn’t waste it on clothes. People stared when they were in towns. Vax could slip into the shadows easily enough, but Vex didn’t quite have his skills in stealth. She felt the eyes of strangers, burning her, judging her.

No, it was better to stay in the outskirts of town, perhaps braving an inn when the weather grew too cold.

The cub was stirring. He moaned a little at first, but then seemed to recognize the face of the person that had saved him. He didn’t try to attack her, at least, but then, she thought he mightn’t have had enough energy to attack anyway. 

‘Hey, buddy.’ She knelt down next to the bear, and offered him a large chunk of sizzling rabbit meat. He sniffed it carefully, as though trying to check that it was safe to eat. Vex felt a sudden surge of hatred towards the poachers that had kept him. ‘It’s okay,’ she reassured him. ‘It’s okay, Trinket.’

Though she had her back to him, she could sense Vax rolling his eyes. ‘Your own Trinket,’ he said. ‘Clever. You know bears are dangerous animals, right?’ Vex ignored him, and the bear – Trinket – apparently decided that the food was safe, and began eating it with fervor. He was very disappointed that there was no more food, but was somewhat mollified when Vex began to scratch behind his ears.

‘He’s going to run off in the night,’ Vax said. He had rolled out his bedroll – much closer than he usually would – and was settling in to sleep.

Vex didn’t think that he would. She couldn’t explain why, but she knew that the bear would be there in the morning.

During the night, she had had horrible dreams, revolving around the poachers she had killed. Vax hadn’t asked any questions about why she had gone from the camp; he was clearly distracted by the creature she had returned with. If he had noticed the blood smears on her clothes, he certainly hadn’t said anything. 

When she woke, it took her a few moments to realize what the furry thing that was curled into her side was. Trinket was fast asleep, and had clearly moved to lie next to her during the night. 

Vax was already up, spreading dirt over the now dead fire. He had already packed up his things.

‘Why are you so eager to leave?’ Vex asked. She stretched out, wincing slightly at the pain in her muscles.

‘It’s almost noon,’ he replied. ‘You’ve been asleep for ages.’

‘Oh.’ Vex frowned. ‘You should have woken me.’

Vax ignored that. ‘Looks like you’re his mother, now. What happened to his real mother? You didn’t kidnap a bear, did you?’ He gave her a mock-horrified sort of look, as though he really thought she would be the sort of person that would kidnap a bear.

‘She died,’ Vex told him. It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t care to mention that she had put his mother out of her misery. Or where she had found him, and what she had done to get them both out of there. ‘He would have, too, if I hadn’t brought him with me.’ She remembered, suddenly, why he hadn’t been there, when she had...when things had happened. ‘How much gold did you get – for the things?’

‘Five gold, three silver,’ he said. Vex couldn’t help but be disappointed. Their funds had been running rather low – another reason why they didn’t want to spend too much time in towns. Things in towns cost money. ‘You should have come with me,’ he said. ‘You’re better at haggling.’

Vex didn’t disagree. If she’d gone with him, if they’d waited until they had sold their wares to set up camp, then she might never have been taken. Or, conversely, they both would have been taken, and would still be locked up in a cage somewhere.

No. If they had both been taken, Vax would have picked the lock much faster than she had. He would have argued endlessly about her taking Trinket with them, but he would have acquiesced in the end.

That didn’t mean, though, that she was any more comfortable about the idea of going into towns. Especially dressed like they were. Especially with a bear.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, as though the thought hadn’t just suddenly popped into her head. ‘I think we should get out of these clothes. People stare at us. They think we have money, and that might get us killed.’

‘Especially since we have no money,’ Vax said, grimacing. ‘You know, if we’re going to be wandering the woods, we need to be able to protect ourselves.’ Vex gave him a look, trying to figure out whether he knew more than he was letting on. He saw her expression as a questioning one. ‘I mean, we should buy some armor,’ he clarified. ‘Better armor. Not Syngorn ceremonial armor.’

‘Oh,’ Vex frowned. ‘We don’t have enough money for that.’

‘Once we sell these, we might have something. Nothing fancy, just...something.’ It was a hard ask, and Vax knew it. New, their Syngornian clothes might have fetched them a few gold, but after weeks of hard travel, and their own sub-optimal mending abilities meant that they would be lucky to get anything for them.

She packed her own things up, cinching the bedroll tight with a belt against the bottom of her bag. Then, she looked down at her new charge, the wide-eyed bear cub that was staring up at her, clearly hungry once more. There was some pieces of cold deer leftover – not enough to salt, but enough to put a little something in their stomachs before they reached the next town. There were a few chunks of bread as well, left from what Vex had shared with her captors. She wasn’t sure if bears ate bread or not.

‘Can he walk?’ Vax asked. Vex’s mind was still somewhat caught up with the events of yesterday, and it took a few moments for her to process her brother’s words.

Yes, she thought. Then, she looked at the bear, so small, so weak. Just like her, in a way. She couldn’t even hang from a tree branch without her arms giving out on her.

‘I’ll carry him,’ Vex said, resolutely. Vax gave her a look.

‘Or,’ he said, ‘You’ll carry him until your arms get tired, and then I’ll have to carry him.’

Vex gave a helpless sort of shrug. She was sure that after a few weeks of regular meals, the bear would be perfectly capable of walking on his own. Once he grew bigger, he might even be able to carry some of their things.

To stop some of Vax’s bitching, she fashioned a sling out of one of their spare blankets, and tied it around their neck. Trinket’s dark brown eyes looked up at her, a little sheepishly.

‘He’s going to scratch your eyes out,’ Vax said. Vex gave him the finger. She saw something in the bear’s eyes – like he understood that she was the one who saved him.

He gave something that looked almost like a smile when she scratched his belly. He didn’t like it as much as he liked the back, or the neck scratches, she found, as they continued their travels. After a few days, the bear gained enough strength to be able to amble alongside her, occasionally chasing after birds, or following an errant smell for several hundred feet.

It slowed them down a little bit, and though Vax didn’t seem to complain out loud, Vex could tell he was a little uneasy about their decreasing ability to make a quick getaway.

Over the next few weeks, Trinket grew quickly. Where at first he had barely (Ha!) come up to her knee, he had put on a remarkable size. He had stayed with them the first night, and the night after that, and the night after that. Eventually, Vax seemed to accept that the bear was not going to leave them.

In any case, Vex suspected that her brother had a sweet spot for Trinket. She had noticed once, after coming back from hunting, the two of them asleep together, Vax’s hand resting on the bear’s back. She made her footsteps a little louder than normal, giving Vax the chance to pretend that nothing had happened, before the three of them shared a deer that had been grazing in the early morning light.

Once they grew a little more confident, they occasionally chanced an evening in an inn, or a tavern. Since very few establishments seemed to like adolescent bears sleeping on the hearthrug, Vax would distract the staff, while Vex and Trinket sneaked in through the back. It was a reasonably effective tactic, only resulting in their banishment from a few places. It would not work forever, though; full-grown, Trinket could weight up to eight hundred pounds, and would be difficult to sneak anywhere.

Where once it had been just her and Vax against the world, now it was her, Vax, and a bear cub against the world. A bear cub with a bottomless pit for a stomach; Vex went hunting most mornings, or fishing if they were near any kind of river. Trinket loved fish, and it was always nice to have a change from deer or rabbit. They could always sell the leftovers, not that there were many, after Trinket had eaten. It reached the point, soon enough, where he went off foraging on his own, as her hunting wasn’t nearly enough to sustain his needs.

‘He’s not coming back,’ Vax said, every time the bear wandered off, and yet he always did come back. He was more than just a pet, he was a companion, to her and to Vax.

‘He’ll come back,’ Vex said, and there was never a single point in time that she doubted those words.

Trinket obeyed every command she ever gave, even though she obviously could not speak bear, and he could not speak Common. He even helped her, more than once, in getting revenge on Vax.

Vex put a finger to her lips. She was sure that Trinket didn’t understand the gesture, but he seemed to understand through her body language that he was supposed to be quiet. They were both tucked into a tree hollow, hidden from view. Vax had gone to collect firewood.

She suppressed a giggle. This, she hoped, would be adequate revenge for the time Vax had put a handful of peppercorns in her breakfast, or the time he had hidden her bootlaces, or any of the other times he had pranked her over the years.

‘Vex’ahlia?’ Vax’s voice was cautious, and more than a little worried. Well, it served him right – it had taken her ages to wash the mud out of her undertunic last month, when he’d poured a bucket of it over her while she slept.

‘On three,’ she whispered to Trinket, who quite plainly didn’t understand countdowns, either. But when Vex jumped out of the tree, roaring, Trinket did too.

Vax jumped backwards in fear, tripping over his cloak. There was a look of sheer terror in his eyes, that quickly faded as he heard Vex laugh. ‘I knew you were there,’ he said, as he got to his feet. He said it in a quiet sort of voice, though. 

‘You were worried about me,’ Vex said. It wasn’t a question. She knew her brother like he was a part of herself. ‘You were really worried.’

‘The camp was abandoned without any sign of a struggle,’ he said. Usually if you go hunting, you leave me a note.’ He paused. ‘I’d do anything to protect you, Vex’ahlia, you know that.’

She did know that. And she knew that she would do anything to protect him too. It was them against the world, or something like that.

Vex put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Next time I get you back,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it in a way that doesn’t scare you.’

Vax gave a small smile. ‘How did you manage to get Trinket to hide as well?’ The bear had taken a step back, no longer roaring, but ready to attack if necessary.

‘I don’t know.’ Vex shrugged. ‘He sort of just...does what I tell him to do.’ It was the first time that she had really stopped to think about it. The bear did seem very keen on listening to the things that she told him to do. She had been working on trying to teach him to attach, with his claws, and with his teeth. If nothing else, he would be able to defend himself the next time hunters came around.

‘Vex’ahlia, the bear whisperer,’ Vax joked. He rubbed both her and Trinket on the head. Trinket looked a little dismayed, but he seemed to trust that Vax would never do anything to hurt him.

Between them, they had made the decision to go to go south. It had been long enough – over a year, by now, Vex thought, that Syldor would have given up looking for them there. Hopefully – more than likely – he would have given them up as dead, and moved on with his life.

The journey to Byroden would take weeks. To start with, they had been up in the far north, where the snow had billowed around them like a storm. Though they spent most nights in an inn, judging the few silver that it cost to be worth it, in this weather, their days were spent on the road. A couple of nights in, they had been set upon by a pack of wolves, and had dispatched them, with no small amount of blood shed. The next day, they spent healing, and stitching together fur cloaks from the hides. It was not much, but it might be enough to keep them from freezing to death.

The weather made for slow traveling; it was folly to camp out in the wild while it was so cold, so they were limited by the distance between towns. Some days, they barely managed ten miles, before the wind became too much to bear.

Eventually, though, they made it far enough south that they could make it through the night without dying of cold. Their travel days became longer, and they slept more soundly from the toll their bodies took. Their camps were well-guarded now; not many bandits wanted to take on even a partly grown bear, even if his growl was worse than his bite. Every night, he lay his head down to rest on Vex’s chest, each ferocious snore shaking her whole body. Soon, he would be too big for even that, and they would have to swap places, her nestled in amongst his big, furry body.

It was late in the afternoon when the reached the outskirts of the small town where they had been born. They had once again, kept to the edge of the Expanse, their footfalls even softer than they had been the last time they’d set foot there, their minds older and sharper.

The town was different to how she remembered. When they’d left – almost eight years ago, now – she was certain that the buildings hadn’t been charred by flame. There was a whole section of the town that seemed newer than the rest.

The house they had grown up in was gone. At first, she thought she had misremembered where it was, that it was a few rows back, but everything in the surrounding district was nothing more than dirt and ash, and a few burned skeletal structures. The house they had grown up in was nothing but ruin.

She could see the gnarled old tree, that she would climb to watch carriages ride past, that Vax would throw daggers at when Mother wasn’t looking. Though it still bore the knife scars, it too had clearly undergone some terrible trauma.

Vex shot a look at her brother, who had the same daunting realization on his face.

Something horrible had happened here.

They needed to find out what. They needed to find out if their mother was still alive. Perhaps, whatever had happened, whatever horrible, horrible event had taken place, she had gotten out alive.

Even years later, Vex wasn’t sure why they hadn’t simply gone up to someone and asked what had happened. Told someone that they used to live in this village, and that they wanted to know what had happened to their mother.

She supposed that the omnipresence of guards made her feel uneasy. As though if they did or said anything suspicious, they would be dragged away from here once more, never being able to find out the truth. Being in Syngorn had made them mistrustful of any kind of authority, because most of the authority in Syngorn were arseholes.

After a quick conversation huddling behind a brick wall, they decided to go to the butcher shop. It was one of the newer buildings in town, which meant that the proprietor might not recognize them. 

In their experience, shopkeepers seemed to gave a good measure on the gossip of the town. That, and barkeeps, but, though they had been served ale in a dozen different towns on the way here, she didn’t think the guards outside the tavern would take too kindly to a couple of scrawny teenagers stepping inside.

Vex bought a few large sausages, with the funds that they had earned over the last few weeks. She thought it would be better to sweeten the deal, before she started asking questions. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘I think my brother and I came through this town several years ago, but it looked so different. What happened?’

The butcher grunted. ‘Dragon attack, couple of years back. Lost a lot of people, and a lot of the town.’ Vex felt a sickening feeling form in the pit of her stomach.

‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ she said. It wasn’t a lie, but he couldn’t know how horrible it was for her to hear. ‘There was a woman here – she was so kind to us. Do you know if the seamstress – Elaina – did she survive?’

He thought about it for a few seconds. They were the longest seconds of Vex’s life. ‘I’m pretty sure she was one of the ones we lost,’ he said, and it was like a knife to Vex’s chest. The breath seemed to escape from her body, and she wanted nothing more than to fall to her knees and wail.

They had waited so long to come here, and now…

He must have seen the distress she felt, must have felt sorry for her, because there were a couple of steaks in with the rest of the meat she had bought. He gave her directions to the graveyard on the edge of town, where the bodies from the dragon attack were buried.

Where their Mother was buried.

Vax darted out from an alleyway. He had been lurking around, trying to find any trace of information on where the house had gone, on what had happened. He saw the look on her face, immediately. He didn’t even need to ask.

As they walked to the graveyard, she told him of the dragon attack. It explained the increased level of guards in the town, the way everyone seemed to be on high alert. The guards could not have cared less about the two lost, broken half-elves that wandered the streets.

There did not seem to be individual graves for the victims of the dragon attack. Vex couldn’t let herself stop to think why – that there had been too many of them, that the bodies were too unrecognizable, so many horrible thoughts that would continue to run through her head.

Instead, there was a stone plaque, with over three hundred names, a commemoration to those that had died to the dragon. Vex took a few silver pieces from their dwindling funds, and bought flowers from a merchant across the way. They made a wreath of sorts, and laid it on the plaque.

Somehow, without even discussing in, they both knew that they couldn’t spend anymore time in Byroden. The sun was getting low in the sky, but Vex would rather spend a night in the woods than have old memories be brought up.

They collected Trinket on the edge of town, and the bear stuck to Vex’s side a little more than usual. He was quite good at gauging her emotions, Vex had learned, and it was so much easier to cuddle a bear than to talk about the things that were bothering her.

They went a little way into the Verdant Expanse – at least here, things didn’t seem to have changed much. The trees were a little older, a little more gnarled, but were still there for the most part. They made camp in the hollow of a large oak tree, with no more than half a dozen words exchanged between them.

Vex cooked their meat over a small fire; though neither of them felt particularly hungry, they always been taught not to let food go to waste. Trinket felt no such compunctions, and though he was just as hungry as ever, he did not move from her side, squished between her and the tree like an awkward sort of pillow.

They were on their own now.

There was no question of whether or not they would return to Syngorn. Vex never wanted to set foot in that city again. She didn’t need people staring at her, judging her, calling her names.

They would keep wandering through Tal’Dorei, until they found a place that they could call home. If they didn’t find one on Tal’Dorei, they would go across to Marquet, or Wildemount, or Issylra. They would keep going until they found somewhere to set down roots. 

Until then...Vex looked across at her brother. He was leaned up against a buttress, looking quietly contemplative. She looked down at Trinket, curled into her legs.

As long as she had her family, she thought, everything would be okay.


	3. II.

II.

It took the twins a long time to come to terms with having a family again.

It wasn’t the sort of family they had expected to make – one other half-elf, a couple of gnomes, and a Goliath. It made for some awkward family portraits, not that they’d ever had to sit for one. Vex remembered, painfully, a time back in Syngorn, when Syldor had commissioned a portrait. She wasn’t sure why he had done it, since apart from dragging them from their mother’s arms, he seemed content to pretend that they didn’t exist. He had scolded Vax for making silly faces, and told Vex to fix her hair, and tidy her clothes. They had been running late, spying on people in the Reverie Walks. Vex had jumped from the second-lowest branch of the tree, in her haste to get down, and had landed awkwardly, her robes dusty, and her hair askew. While Syldor’s back was turned, she had shot him a very rude gesture.

There were lots of rude gestures in the Super High-Intensity Team, mostly made by Grog and Scanlan. It was nice to be around people that didn’t have sticks up their behinds. In fact, all of their little rag-tag adventuring group were reasonably laid-back sort of bunch. 

They didn’t care about what shape your ears were.

Soon, they did find someone that was a little more...upper-class than the rest of them. The sort of person that knew how to arrange the cutlery for a fancy dinner.

Ironically, though, they found him in a prison cell, deep in the Umbra Hills. Though he was dressed nicely, the cell was little more than squalor. His eyes seemed to be focused on a point beyond them, either not noticing their presence, or not wanting to notice their presence. ‘Are you real?’ he said, after a while, his eyes suddenly locking into her own.

‘Yes,’ Vex said, not sure what else she could possibly say. She was sure that even a hallucination would have said yes. The man seemed to sit up all of a sudden, with a rigidity that could only be achieved by people with sticks up their arses. That, plus the clothes, and the glasses, made Vex think that this was definitely someone worth a bit of money, perhaps even some kind of nobleman.

What was a noble doing out here so far away from anything else? Why hadn’t he bothered to pay his way out of prison like so many other nobles she had met. Money could do a lot of things. It could even bring people back to life, if you had enough of it. She wondered how much gold it would take to bring their mother back. Certainly more than the meager sum that they had.

‘I will make it well worth your while,’ the man said, ‘If you break me out of this prison.’ He seemed sincere. Sometimes, Vex found it hard to tell. But this man was desperate, and desperate people always seemed willing to pay the right price.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Scanlan. His eyes were narrowed in suspicion. Vex didn’t blame him. Random strangers found in prison cells were rarely good news.

‘My name,’ said the man. He took a deep sort of breath. ‘Is Percival Frederickstein von Musel Klossowski De Rolo III.’ There was a pause. ‘I need your help.’ Vex’s feelings of mistrust increased. She didn’t think much of anyone that had eight different names and introduced himself by all of them.

Still, she and Vax were new to the whole “working with other people” thing, and she knew that it would do them both well to employ a little trust once in a while. So she watched Vax’s back as he picked the lock, and listened to the distant distraction in the form of Keyleth, Grog and Scanlan, who were all quite adept at making people look the other way.

Still, Vex watched the young human from a distance, ready to strike if anything untoward happened. As a group, they barely knew each other. Certainly not well enough to be able to decide together whether or not the man was trustworthy.

‘If he’s not,’ Grog said, plainly. ‘We’ll just kill him and take all his stuff.’

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ said Percival, wryly. In the full light, Vex could now see more clearly his expensive looking clothes. Though they had seen a lot of wear and tear and were filthy from the grime in the cell, they fit him far better than the Syngornian clothes had ever fit her. He looked like a proper noble, fallen from grace, rather than a child playing dress-up.

He looked like the kind of person that wouldn’t dare get his hands dirty. Certainly not someone that would be any use in a fight. Vex ate her words almost immediately after they did get into a fight, and Percival produced a strange weapon that fired lead projectiles at a phenomenal speed. Certainly faster than her arrows, and probably at least as dangerous, if not more.

‘That’s an interesting weapon you wield,’ Vax commented, clearly having been paying as much attention as Vex, as they search through the remains of the creatures they had slain. ‘I’ve never seen one before.’

‘That’s because I invented it,’ Percival said, with no small hint of pride. ‘It’s called a gun.’

‘Well you can certainly hold you own with it,’ Vex said, musingly. She hadn’t necessarily meant it as a compliment. Mostly, she had meant it in a “you’re not as useless as you look” sort of way. Still, he had taken her words favorably.

She had expected Percival “Call me Percy” de Rolo to be brash, and pompous, and obnoxious. She had judged him in the same way that she and Vax had been judged by the people of Syngorn – by appearances. Percy turned out to be cordial enough – a little pompous, yes, but in an almost endearing sort of way. He, at least, never treated any of them differently due to their non-human blood, though that may have been due to the presence of the enormous barbarian with the enormous weapon that would cleave him in two if so desired.

For the most part, Percy kept to himself. He had not divulged the reason why he had been imprisoned in the Umbra Hills, and none of them had taken it upon themselves to ask. They all had secrets, Vex reasoned, and asking Percy about his would been opening themselves up to interrogation. He wore his wealth and his status like a shield. The moment Vex had not so casually brought up the party treasury, he had handed her a bag of five hundred gold.

He was, at times a little selfish, or condescending, but he seemed to have their backs for the most part. Like Vex, he operated from a distance, and more than once she found herself standing side-by-side with the Gunslinger, as they took out their enemies. He had a certain dry wit about him that didn’t come out often; perhaps more with her than with Vax, or Scanlan, or Keyleth. Grog seemed to be the target of it on occasion, not that he would have noticed.

At that point, Vex wasn’t entirely sure if she considered Percy a friend, but she certainly didn’t mind his company, even if there was a strange sort of darkness in him that she couldn’t quite figure out.

‘Would you perhaps show me how you craft your arrows,’ he asked her, one day, after a difficult fight with trolls. Vex eyed him warily. She knew that Percy had been seeking a way to maximize the distance of his shots. It irked her a little to think that he might do so by picking up a bow. There was one thing in the world that she was good at, and she didn’t want to lose it to him. ‘Not for myself,’ he said, hastily. ‘I have an idea for a project that I’m working on, and it would be useful to know the theory.’

Still suspicious, Vex agreed. They could still, after all, kill him if he put a foot wrong, though, admittedly, the thought was entering her mind less and less these days.

More often than not, she bought her arrows. It took a long time, and was scarcely worth it to craft her own, but she knew how. A long time ago, mother had taught her, as they sat on a rock by the edge of the Gladepools, mother keeping a distant eye on Vax, who was throwing knives at a tree. Her fingers sticky with resin and feathers, she would show off the arrow proudly to Elaina, with a wide toothy grin.

That young, happy, carefree child seemed so far away now.

Percy was a fine craftsman. Certainly much better than she was. It took only him watching her make a single arrow, before he had the process down pat, and even managed to refine it a little, rotating the fletching to make the arrow more streamlined. He made her look like an amateur.

The rest of the evening Percy spent away from their camp, working on whatever project it was he needed the arrows for. Vex didn’t think it had anything to do with his own weapon. Percy had bemoaned on several occasions the need for a full workshop to create his own ammo. For some reason, the idea that he would cast aside his own weapon to take up a bow was utterly insulting to her. As though he didn’t think that she was good enough. But perhaps that was some of the Syngornian blues rearing their ugly head again.

It suited her mood to keep watch while the rest of them slept. While the rest of them except Percy slept, that was. Past midnight, he was still working on whatever project that had filled his mind.

At two o’clock or so, it was Grog’s turn for watch. Vex climbed slowly down the tree, hyper-aware of Percy approaching it simultaneously. 

‘I have something for you,’ he said. Vex looked around, before realizing that she was alone in the clearing. Not that there was any reason to suspect that there was anyone else there. Percy was talking to her. He handed her a single arrow – a little thicker and heavier than her normal arrows, but otherwise similar in design. There was a pouch of some sort that wrapped around the tip of the arrow. ‘It’s a grapple arrow,’ he told her. Vex frowned. ‘If it works – and it very much should work – whoever you fire it at will have a very hard time escaping.’

‘What’s the catch?’ Vex narrowed her eyes. People didn’t just give something for nothing. That lesson she had learned a long time ago. Everyone always wanted something, and they usually did whatever they liked to try and get it.

Percy looked confused. ‘There’s no catch,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anything in return, except perhaps a friendly chat over the campfire every once in a while. Vex’s suspicion did not lift, and Percy gave a small sigh. ‘I know you don’t trust me,’ he said. ‘And quite frankly, I wouldn’t trust myself either. I’m not sure that I do trust myself. But anything that I can do to earn that trust, I’m willing to do it,’ he said.

He left the clearing before Vex could even so much as say “thank-you.” She kicked herself for being such a selfish idiot. Like the rest of them, all he seemed to want was somewhere to belong. 

He crafted her half a dozen more arrows over the next few months, as they traveled up and down Exandria, fulfilling quests, and filling their coin purses. Each arrow he gave her was a little nicer, a little more intricately designed, and each arrow endeared him to her a little bit more. He was still, of course, a little bit pompous, a little bit condescending, but it was in a way that she understood. An utter self-confidence that was so real compared to her own false veneer. 

After a year of traveling together, the group became like family. Certainly more like family than Syldor had ever been. Syldor, who they had run into randomly in Emon, who had, for all intents and purposes, moved on with his life after his twin bastards had disappeared without a trace in the middle of the night.

He didn’t seem displeased to see them, moreover, he looked as though he was glad that they were at the very least okay. It was the most emotion that Vex had ever seen him show, and she wondered for a moment if he had been replaced with an imposter.

Had it not been for Velora, for their sister – ten years old, and they had never even met – Vex would have wanted nothing to do with Syldor. Would have been perfectly happy never seeing the man again, and pretending that there was not a drop of elven blood in their veins. 

Velora, he doted on. She had the nicest clothes, the newest toys. She loved her father, and there was a look of deep warmth in Syldor’s eyes that had certainly never been there when she and Vax were growing up. Vex could have been resentful, but that wouldn’t have been productive. It certainly wasn’t Velora’s fault that their father was a dick.

‘Did you know our mother died?’ Vax said, angrily, upon the first meeting in Emon, all those years later. Syldor did not look surprised – moreover, he looked a little ashamed. Things clicked into place for Vex, all of a sudden, and she felt sick. How could she not have known?

‘You knew,’ she said, simply. If looks could have killed, Syldor would have been nothing more than a puddle of mess on the floor. ‘You knew about the dragon attack. That was why you didn’t want us going back.’

‘Knowing only would have upset you,’ he said, and almost instantly realized that it was the wrong thing to say.

‘Of course it would have upset us,’ snapped Vex. She had trouble keeping the utter fury from her voice. ‘She was our mother, and you kept us from her, and now, thanks to you, we will never see her again. You should have brought her with us,’ she said. Mother could have lived with them in Syngorn, though Vex imagined she would have seen more bigotry than they had, that she would not have been happy. At least she would have been alive.

It was perhaps a bit counterproductive, a bit selfish to blame him for Thordak’s attack. In keeping them away from Byroden, he had certainly saved their lives, but there was no way he could have known any of that.

Vex was conflicted when Syldor wanted to hire them. She certainly didn’t want to help him, but he was offering a lot of gold. Certainly more than the job was worth. Perhaps some of that was guilt. Well, if Syldor was feeling guilty, and they got gold, Vex certainly wasn’t going to argue. Gold was what kept them fed and housed and clothed. Gold was what kept them alive. With money, they could have taken mother from Byroden, from their tiny, one room shack where she had died. They could have lived somewhere where she wouldn’t have died needlessly in a dragon attack.

Lots of people seemed to like giving them gold for doing things that were dangerous, foolhardy, or both. Vex was pleased with this development. Getting paid for shooting things was far more lucrative than selling venison and wolf hide and stolen trinkets.

‘We should have done this years ago,’ Vex murmured to her brother, as she raked five hundred or so gold into the bag of party funds. She had enough personal gold aside to buy a couple of greater healing potions. Not a superior, but enough to keep her and Vax alive and breathing. That was her main concern. Enough to keep them alive, enough to keep them fed, enough to keep them off the streets and in warm and comfortable inns. At least no-one would try to kidnap her in an inn.

Somewhere along the way, they stopped doing what they were doing for the money, and started doing it because it was the right thing to do. They had transformed from mercenaries to...well, Vex was loath to call them heroes. They didn’t always act very heroically. Like shooting off peoples’ hands, or murdering old people.

It would have been so easy, when the dragons attacked, for them to run away and hide. Go somewhere far, far away, and let somebody else deal with the problem. 

But no. They couldn’t do that. Vex couldn’t do that. She would not stand idly by while Thordak – her mother’s killer – laid siege over Emon. Could not stand idly by while four dragons – the creatures she had studied so relentlessly – decimated the countryside.

It seemed an age ago now – after they had first left Byroden after finding the truth. Vex, Vax and Trinket had traveled to Westruun, to the Cobalt Reserve. 

Thanks to the juvenile bear in their company, they had camped outside of town. For months, Vex had gone to the Reserve every day, to find out as much as she could about the creature that had killed her mother.

She hadn’t known then, that it had been Thordak. It had not been until Allura told tale of binding Thordak to the Elemental Plane that they discovered who had been responsible. All she knew was that she had to learn everything about dragons as humanly possible. Their strengths, their weaknesses, their habits. Every day, for months on end, she read, and when she had finished reading all the books she could find in Westruun (and Vax had run out of houses to pilfer), they moved onto the next town, the next library.

When they finally faced the beast that slew their mother, she would be prepared. She never could have predicted how it would happen, though; with four chromatic dragons laying waste to Tal’Dorei, and her watching, helplessly.

They needed something beyond knowledge. They needed weapons, and allies, and things to defend themselves. They needed to find a set of armor in the tomb of the Raven Queen’s Champion.

The first encounter Vex’ahlia Vessar had with the Raven Queen was in the sunken tomb at the bottom of the Marrowglade Loch.

Well, no. That wasn’t true. The first encounter was in the moldy pages of an ancient book that, frankly, she had vastly overpaid for. The idea still rankled. Thirty gold for a book was little more than highway robbery.

It was a fascinating tale, of death, and hatred and all of those things. The Raven Queen, she learned, despised the undead, despised anything that sought to pervert the natural course of death. That point was made fairly clearly throughout the text.

The path of Fate is sacrosanct. Those who pridefully attempt to cast off their destiny must be punished.

Death is the natural end of life. There is no pity for those who have fallen.

Undeath is an atrocity. Those who would pervert the transition of the soul must be brought down.

Such were the commandments of the Raven Queen. At first, they were a mere curiosity to Vex. After she lost her life in the tomb of the Raven Queen’s champion, things got a little murkier.

The last thing Vex remembered was standing behind Percy as he lifted the armor of Purvan Suul from his final resting place. She had been just on the verge of telling him to stop, that she could sense something wasn’t quite right, that there was something...dark there, when the wave of death hit her.

That was about the time that all of their lives changed, for better or worse.

At first, she didn’t remember what happened after that. There was darkness for a little while, and then she awoke, with half a dozen or so concerned faces standing around, and Grog telling her that she had died.

It certainly hadn’t felt like anything more than falling unconscious, which they had all done with embarrassing regularity. She hadn’t felt as though her soul had left her body, or anything like that.

Then, she learned the truth.

Then she learned of the massive sacrifice that her brother had made, offering to trade his life for hers. It seemed strange, seemed so against the principles of the Raven Queen that she had read about, to save one person’s life, to pervert the course of fate, the transition of her soul, for the sake of having a champion.

At first, she was more concerned with Vax, and whatever it was that he did or didn’t do to bring her back. 

Not long after that, the nightmares started.

She wasn’t sure if the dreams were an accurate reflection of what she had seen on the other side, or if she was simply having them because she knew what had happened. In her dreams, she reached towards the image of the Raven Queen, those dark feathers always just a few inches out of reach. She didn’t dare tell her brother about the dreams. He had enough things to worry about.

She wondered what would have happened if Vax had not been there to make his deal. If he had taken just a little bit longer to climb up from the pit. Would the Raven Queen have deigned to let her return? Would it be her that wore the Deathwalker’s Ward, the dark queen’s chosen Paladin? It was a disconcerting sort of thought. She couldn’t imagine herself being anyone’s sworn anything. She had her own sort of faith, but it was not anywhere near as infallible as Vax’s. Vex would have sooner told the Raven Queen to shove it.

Vax pledged himself to the Raven Queen, and Vex did not sleep for a week. She didn’t dare tell him that, because all he ever did was worry about her. Even after he’d effectively sold his soul, just to bring her back.

It wasn’t just because he’d sold his soul. Or it was, but not for those reasons. There was a strange, selfish part of her that felt a little affronted, as though the Raven Queen had been on the verge of choosing Vex, but then changing her mind when a better offer was presented.

It’s par for the course, said the little voice in the back of her head. The voice that spoke all of her doubts, and insecurities. You aren’t special, or important. You’re only ever going to be second best.

Vax, after all, had always been more faithful than her. He had been edging closer and closer towards some kind of connection with Sarenrae, and Vex was sure that he would have taken the path of Paladin anyway, just underneath a different master. Not that Vex was unfaithful; it just didn’t come as easily to her as it did to him. Death certainly hadn’t changed that. She wasn’t inclined to have faith in an entity that held such command over her brother’s soul.

An entity that could very easily have had command over her own soul.

There were other reasons that she was having trouble sleeping. The town that she had grown to call home had fallen to the Chroma Conclave, and Emon to Thordak, the Cinder King. Not just any dragon, but the dragon that had razed Byroden, and slayed their mother, so many years ago. What hope did she have of helping slay four ancient dragons, if a mere trap was capable of killing her in an instant?

When they fought Umbrasyl, she fared okay. Not fantastically – getting caught in a stream of liquid acid wasn’t exactly fun – but she made it out alive. There was one dragon down, and three to go. Avenging their mother’s death was so close, and yet so far away. Umbrasyl had been powerful enough; Thordak was ancient, enormous, and held the city of Emon under siege. Thousands of lives depended on them.

And then, just when she thought things were maybe getting back to normal, the Raven Queen called upon her Champion.

Her foolhardy, reckless champion, who thought that teleporting inside the stomach of a dragon was a good idea.

So they went to Vasselheim, and Vax went into the temple at Duskmeadow. Vex waited outside.

She felt sick.

Already, it felt like a strange line in the sand of their relationship. One day, at the Raven Queen’s behest, he would have to go somewhere that she could not follow. Since the day they were born, they’d never been separated longer than a week, and Vex was coming to the realization that those separations were going to become more and more frequent.

Somehow, it felt like he was leaving her behind. He had changed – had grown – so much since she died, in a way that she hadn’t. He was fate-touched, and she was not. 

Or, if he was fate-touched, then she was fate-spurned. 

Some days, she thought that she hadn’t really processed what had happened the day that she had died. She’d been too concerned about what Vax had done, what would happen to Vax, to think about how close she had come to never being able to avenge their mother’s death.

If the Raven Queen had not been in need of a champion, then she would have died with no recourse, her greatest wish unfulfilled. Vax would be somewhere else, perhaps still in mourning, perhaps fallen in the fight against Umbrasyl. So many things that could have been different. Or perhaps nothing would have changed at all. She wasn’t a powerful spellcaster; her actions were rarely the clutch moment in a battle. She could deal damage, and that was about it.

Eventually, Vax came of out the Raven’s Crest, rather more subdued than usual.

They returned to the Slayer’s Take, and Vex helped draw a bath for Vax. She looked pointedly away as he lowered himself into the piping hot water.

‘So did you have fun meeting your new girlfriend?’ she asked. Vax did not respond immediately, and Vex didn’t particularly want to turn around and watch him bathe himself clean. ‘Do you not like it when I call her your girlfriend?’

He was serious in that dark, Vax sort of way that she always hated. The way he always got when he didn’t want to talk about something. Though he would never admit it, Vex knew that her brother spent as much time in his head, self-doubting, as she did.

Not that either of them would ever show it.

‘I am...her champion,’ Vax said, slowly. ‘I fight in her name; that is the deal that was made.’

‘The deal that was made for my life,’ Vex added. There was an awkward sort of silence.

‘The Matron did not say, though I suspect she may have been watching me since long before you died.’ He almost choked a little on those last two words, as though the memory was still painful. The confession that he made was not what Vex had expected. ‘I don’t regret it, in any case. I still have you, after all.’ He didn’t blame her for dying. For doing something stupid and getting herself killed. She hadn’t even realized that was something that she was worried about until that point.

‘Well, not all of us get to be marked by fate,’ she said, in an off-hand sort of way. She hadn’t meant for her words to sound bitter, but she knew they did anyway.

‘Does it bother you?’ Vax asked, suddenly. ‘That the Raven Queen accepted my offer?’

‘I’m glad to be alive, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Vex said, knowing precisely that it wasn’t what he was asking.

‘It’s not,’ he said, shortly. He was looking at her in a curious sort of way, as though seeing something for the first time. Vex hesitated. She wasn’t sure how to word her concerns in a way that didn’t make her sound petty. That for once in her life, she had wanted to feel special, and the Raven Queen had bypassed her entirely. That Vax was the “chosen” one, and she was just the one that had died to get him there.

It was a thought that was still invading her thoughts some days later, when they had no choice but to return to Syngorn. The place where they had been anything but special.

There was something that had always been at the back of her mind; if she had looked a little nicer, a little more Elvish, a little more put-together, would they have treated her any better? She spent the better part of a night polishing her armor, clipping the stray threads, straightening the feathers.

Vex hated it. She hated the way people looked at her. The same way they had, so many years ago. And again, Vax seemed to take it all in stride, as though the criticism wasn’t even directed at him at all. 

And then Percy went and gave his grand gesture, in front of everyone, giving her everything she thought she ever wanted.

The gesture was wonderful in the moment, but she noticed that very little changed in the way the people of Syngorn saw her. She was just another ill-born bastard, except now she had a title.

The fact that Percy gave her a title meant far less to her than the fact that Percy had given her a title. The title was nothing compared to the fact that he had seen her at the lowest point in her life that he had ever seen, and did something to try and make it better. That was worth more than a thousand titles. It was the single kindest thing that anyone had ever done for her.

She hated that the offer meant so much to her. She hated that she wanted it, that she needed it to feel better about herself. She hated that it made her feel important, and she hated that it didn’t do nearly as much as she thought it might.

Vax came and found her in the mansion that night. He had noticed, as she knew he would have, the way being in Syngorn had affected her, the way Percy’s actions had affected her. The way he had made her feel special. 

When had lost his memories of the Feywild, she was less concerned with the loss of the title than she was of the loss of the reasons he had given it in the first place. It was the kindest act of love that anyone had ever done for her, save perhaps Vax’s sacrifice. That he would do something like that without expecting anything in return was far more than she could have asked from anyone.

That being said, she rather liked the city of Whitestone, vampires, and lichs, and almost dying in the ziggurat aside. It wasn’t as big as Emon, and its proximity to the Parchwood Timberlands meant that if things got a little too much, it was easy enough to slip off into the monster-filled forest.

Even still, she had nightmares for weeks about what had happened in the Shademurk Bog. Saundor’s words had been more effective than Fenthras at piercing through to her heart, and she wonder what might have happened if Percy hadn’t been there. If he hadn’t bestowed upon her a gift of pure love, of letting her know, in his own Percy sort of way, that she was loved. If she had been a little weaker, if Saundor had been a little less...creepy, she might have reached out her hand and accepted his offer.

The path that would have set her on, she didn’t want to think about. Did want to think about the darkness that might have consumed her, the things she might have done to feel as though her life had purpose.

There was a small part of her that had been a little tempted, that had thought that being granted untold power for something so worthless as her heart was a pretty fair deal. Of course, it wouldn’t have been untold power, and she probably would have had to have given up a little more than just her heart. All in all, she was satisfied with the decision she made, even if it felt like she was spurning fate once more.

All these chances to become something special, the voice said, and you keep turning them down.

There was purpose in her life, of course. To say there wasn’t would be an insult to her mother’s memory. Her purpose now was to defeat the Chroma Conclave, to put an end to the beast that had slain their mother.

Beyond that, though, her fate had always been intertwined with Vax’s. Everything they had done; leaving Byroden, leaving Syngorn, joining Vox Machina, they had done together. Then, she had gone and gotten herself killed in the stupidest way possible, and their lives changed forever.

How could she ever truly repay what her brother had done for her? How could anything possibly compare to the value of the life he had given up.

Every time she even hinted at trying to broach that subject, Vax brushed it off. “You would have done the same for me,” he said. It was true, of course – not that she’d ever had the opportunity. They would have followed each other into the fiery depths of hell.

The problem was, any time she tried to make any kind of sacrifice, he pushed it away. He would let himself make a hundred sacrifices, but would barely let her make a single one in return.

She had told him more than once that she would have died for him – and she meant it. 

The one time she did die as the result of his actions was in a dark dragon lair under Emon, surrounded by lava. The battle with Thordak had been tough enough without Vax having attacked Raishan immediately afterwards.

When she had thought about having a nice hot bath, she hadn’t meant in lava.

This time when she died, there was even less time to process than she’d had under the Marrowglade Loch. They went from one Raishan battle to the next, with barely a day in between. She and Percy found half an hour or so to themselves, after they had finished their baths, and had breakfast, and everyone else had gone to bed.

It felt strange, trying to sleep while the sun shone so brightly outside. They both lay there, willing themselves to sleep. Vex’s body ached so much, her mind was racing so much that sleep did not come easily.

‘How are you feeling?’ Percy asked. His body had been so still that she had known he was still awake. Usually, when he slept, he moved a lot more.

‘Well, Thordak is dead, which is a wonderful weight lifted off my shoulders,’ she said, after a few moments. The enemy that she had been dreaming about, had been seeking out for so many years, was gone.

‘I meant after having died,’ he said. Percy was rarely one to mince his words. Even when he talked about a difficult subject, he was verbose and eloquent.

‘Oh,’ Vex said. The truth was, she’d sort of forgotten. The same way as last time, she had vague sort of memories of the other side; a cold sort of darkness. She had head Pike’s voice, calling her back, and she had followed. It might as well have been a brief unconsciousness, rather than a death. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, truthfully. ‘Grateful, I suppose. There’s still so much to do.’

The tables were turned just a day or so later, when Percy died on the island of Viscan, eviscerated by Raishan. Thankfully, he was Revivified quickly, but the ritual to bring Scanlan back failed, leaving them in a mad rush to return to Whitestone, and resurrect the gnome, and no time to discuss everything else that had happened.

The night Vex spent away from Percy in Kymal, was painful, but not nearly as painful as waiting to find out whether the ritual had been successful. Her own death seemed so unimportant in comparison to finding Kaylie, and all of the drama that followed. It was just one of those things that she hadn’t had time to think about. One of those things that she hadn’t really wanted to think about.

Then, less than two weeks later, Vax had died in the Water Plane, and any thoughts of her own death had gone completely to the wayside. She had thought about it, of course, during their time on the Ozmit Sea to Vesrah, in amongst bouts of seasickness and boredom. It had all happened so fast; killing Thordak, confronting Raishan, dying, being brought back. There was just an empty period of blackness in her mind. She hadn’t seen a bright light, or her mother waiting for her, or any of the things she would have expected to see. All told, she’d probably been dead for only a few seconds or so. She had been thinking more about the defeat of Thordak, of finally having avenged their mother.

Vax had been dead a lot longer. Vax had needed the approval of his benefactor to return. The approval, and the promise that Vox Machina would slay one of the Raven Queen’s most despised enemies.

‘I’m here today because of a bargain my brother made with you, so I know you like to make deals as much as I do. He traded his life. He became your champion, and you spared mine, and what a striking champion he is. Long dark hair and a strong lithe figure soaring over the land in raven feathers and a dark vestige. He set pyres in your honor. Sent soul after soul to you. It would be a shame to give that up, especially now. And I remember the book that I read. Especially now as Orcus builds his forces against you. The demon prince of the undead seeks to claim your throne. You know this as well as I. We just recently killed one of his loyal servants in the Underdark, before my brother ever came into your service. Imagine what he could do now. So this is the deal I make with you: you send him back, allow my brother to come home, and we will seek out Orcus. I will track him down, I will hunt him in whatever pit he resides, and we will destroy your enemy once and for all. What say you?’

Vex had never particularly been one for long speeches. She prided herself on her ability to haggle with a sentence or two, and sometimes a well-placed wink. Even the Raven Queen, though, could be persuaded to let someone go, it seemed. Once again, undeath was no concern if it could be used to the Raven Queen’s advantage.

When she told Vax of the offer she had made to kill Orcus, he was...not indifferent. That wasn’t the right word. Resigned, maybe. It was his first time dying though, so she cut him a little bit of slack. It was tough both physically and mentally.

She didn’t tell him that she had found the note inside his armor, but she suspected that he knew anyway. He had been a thief long enough to be able to spot the telltale signs of when items had been moved.

Take these wings and fly, the note had said. Wings aside, Vex knew that she would never-- could never – wear the Deathwalker’s Ward. For one thing, every waking day would be a reminder of what she had lost, and what she could never see again. The other thing was...well, she didn’t want to live in the shadow of anyone’s legacy. She didn’t want to be the leftover twin, the one that wasn’t fated to do anything.

The boots? Well, that was a different story. She would have taken those boots in a heartbeat. Every time she tried to joke about it, to lighten the mood, he got upset and changed the subject. And yet whenever she went to bed to chicken pasted sheets, it was the height of hilarity.

The Nine Hells was about as awful as Vex expected it to be, Percy making a literal deal with a devil notwithstanding. They all made it through alive, save for Doty, enormous mechanical servant of Sir Taryon Darrington, a man who seemed every bit as pompous as Vex had first thought Percy to be. He was charming in his own naive sort of way, though he was no replacement for Scanlan. Things were certainly a little less cheerful without the bard around, but as much as he claimed he was useless, they had certainly felt his absence in the Nine Hells.

Killing the Rakshasa was the last of the little, annoying sort of things that had been lingering incomplete on their list of things to do. Well, second last, as Vex soon found out upon their return to Whitestone.

The title that Percy had granted her came with a test of sorts, after all. She’d always been rather rubbish at tests, especially in Syngorn, where there was always that extra added pressure of facing her father’s resigned disappointment.

Vex knew that if she failed this particular test, it would be far, far worse than any stupid Abyssal exam. For some ridiculous, almost juvenile sort of reason, she desperately wanted Percy to be proud of her. Wanted him to believe that he hadn’t been mistaken in his impromptu titling.

Still, though she killed the Gray Render, and did all the things she supposed a good Mistress of the Grey Hunt was supposed to do, she felt like it should have been easier. Or rather, that she should have done better. The beast had taken her within an inch of her life, and tested her to beyond what she thought she was capable of.

Vex returned, bleeding, broken and bruised, to Whitestone proper, where the rest of Vox Machina had not yet finished their breakfast. It seemed strange to think that she had spent the better part of a full day praying to Pelor, and fighting an enormous creature to the death.

An enormous creature, she soon learned, that the thing that she had killed might have had a child somewhere in the Parchwood, that she might have killed a parent protecting its young. She felt sick. As a supposed beastmaster, she was supposed to protect the creatures in the forest that weren’t trying to kill people. She wasn’t a poacher, she wasn’t like...them.

The thought continued to run through her head even as she let Vax drag her up to bed. To her bed. To her bed in her home in the place that had somehow become home. After all this time, she had never expected it to be Whitestone, that strange city in the north that people didn’t speak much about.

When Vex next awoke, it was well after dinner. As she pulled herself from bed, muscles still tender, body still aching, she saw immediately a very different looking bow resting against the wall where Vax had left it. The branches had curled up even further, and the handle itself seemed thicker.

In that moment, nothing seemed more important than going straight to the archery range, and testing out her weapon’s improved capability.

Arrows seemed to spring forth with a little more power, spark with a little more lightning. More importantly, on the fifth arrow she fired, the target became entangled in a twisted mess of brambles.

‘Well, the target’s not going anywhere,’ said an amused sort of voice behind her. Vex didn’t flinch. She knew the sound of Percy’s footsteps anywhere.

‘At last, the threat of the deadly concentric circles is defeated,’ Vex said, in mock triumph. She held the bow aloft more than a little proudly. ‘With my motherfucking exalted bow.’

Percy smiled. He knew, of course, how frustrated she’d been that the bow was taking so long to reach its final form, so to speak. All the other vestiges that they’d found had reached their exalted state. It took until she had killed a potentially harmless creature for the weapon to feel like she had experienced a moment of growth.

The news that she might have orphaned a cub had been like a knife to the chest. She had wanted to hard to believe that she was doing the right thing, that she was protecting the city, but in the hours since she had woken, the self-doubt was creeping back up again.

For the first time in so long, they had a bit of peace and quiet. No dragons, or vampires, no corrupted beholders or necromancer, just, eventually, a Demon Prince of Undeath. In that downtime, Vex searched the Parchwood for any sign of a juvenile Gray Render, in the hopes of making some kind of penance.

Though she wasn’t sure whether the beast knew that she had been the one that slaughtered its parent, the creature that she found was angry and defensive just the same. Tried as she did to coax it out of its sanctuary, it had fled further into the woodland.

The good thing about having all of the Grey Hunt at her command meant that she could order them to keep an eye out. Part of her was certain, though, that she would never see the thing again.

While she had always sought to find a true home, Vex had thought that settling down, she would have gotten restless. When they had lived in Emon, the few months they had used Greyskull Keep as their base of operations, traveling back and forth, but never quite “settling down,” Vex had thought she’d been happy. Now, though, being able to come back to the same place every night, spending her days helping Percy in the workshop or wandering the Parchwood – this was the life she had been looking for. Though, admittedly, she could have done without watching Keyleth splatter against sharp rocks from a thousand feet up, or having Taryon kidnapped from right under their noses.

She was almost disappointed, then, when Scanlan showed up with news of a second ziggurat. Not disappointed to see Scanlan – she was overjoyed to see Scanlan, not that her sentiment was shared by everyone in their party.

The days – weeks? – after that were all a bit of a blur in Vex’s mind. They went from living a relatively peaceful life to being the saviors of Exandria in what felt like no time at all. It started traveling to the Marquet, with fighting Delilah – fucking again – going through the ziggurat, fighting Vecna, dying again...

The word kill echoed in her head, and she didn’t even feel the life leave her body. Everything went dark, and stayed dark, for what felt like an age. Was this death? Or was she just unconscious again? She tried to look for Vax, for Percy, for anyone else, but it was just nothingness.

And then she came back.

It was sudden; she had barely heard the sound of Pike’s voice, distressed, urgent, calling her back. Of course she would come back. What possible reason could she have to stay?

The full impact of that question didn’t hit her until five minutes later, when they were in the Feywild, and she had Vax’s empty armor clutched in her arms.

She should have stayed.

She should have waited for him, and then whatever it was they did, they would have done it together. Like they had done for so long, until their paths diverged. 

They would be dead, but they would be together.

He had returned, cold as ice, heart slow, and a ticking clock forever counting down. The time they had left was limited, only by however long it took to defeat Vecna. There was a selfish part of her that wanted to delay that act for as long as possible, just so she could spend more time with her brother.

‘You can’t do that,’ said a voice, and it wasn’t her voice, wasn’t that voice in the back of her head. It was Vax’s voice. ‘I want to live,’ he said. ‘Of course I want to live. But not at the expense of losing the world, and I know that you can’t make that sacrifice either.’

It was true. She couldn’t do that. If it was a choice between saving the world, and saving her brother, there was no question. Five years ago, even one year ago, it would have been a harder choice. She would have been far more willing to let the world burn, as long as they were together.

Perhaps, after all this time, she had changed.

The Vex of years past, of course, would have scoffed at the idea of becoming a God’s champion.

She worshiped quietly, never quite finding a God that fit, until Pelor. What better God for a ranger than the God of the land and the sun. So unused to the concept of prayer, her first attempts were clumsy and misguided, asking for things he couldn’t possibly give, or wanting answers for questions she needed to find for herself.

Vax, at least, could commune directly with the Raven Queen, could ask his questions a little more directly. That didn’t mean that the answers he got were any more useful, but at least he got them. The trade-off, of course that he had to bathe in a pool of blood whenever he wanted to do it. That being the case, Vex was happy to stick with her useless prayers.

It brought her some small amount of comfort to think that some higher power out there might be listening. That, plus being able to radiate sunlight from her body was really fucking cool.

In one way or another, the blessings that they received helped in the fight against Vecna. If nothing else, it gave her the confidence to go back in and fight against the God that had killed both her and her brother. The God that had irrevocably changed their lives forever. Whatever happened, whether they won, or whether they lost, she would be losing Vax forever.

She didn’t know how she could live the rest of her life without her brother at her side. They had been together since the beginning, had barely been apart for more than a few months. Even after everything that had happened with the Raven Queen, it didn’t feel right that they would be separated so quickly.

Their paths, she reminded herself, had diverged long before Vecna had entered the fray. Their paths had diverged the day that she’d been a little too slow to notice a trap, and her life force had been forcibly ripped from her body.

Vex didn’t know how she was going to say goodbye.  
If he had actually died during that final fight, it would have been easier. Instead, he said his goodbyes, and walked away, just like he always did when he didn’t want to get involved in a situation.

This way, for a long time, Vex knew there would be that unshakeable feeling in the back of her head that he might return. That he had walked away so many times before, and always come back to ruffle her hair, or to put milk in her waterskin, or generally just be a dick. But no. He had walked away, and he would never be walking back.

The problem was, her mind had too much time to dwell on things. With Vecna’s defeat, they had crossed of the major item on their list. Save the world. Kill the God. Grieve the dead. Check, check, check.

For now, they were done.

There would be other things that they would have to do in the future – kill Orcus, for one. Deal with Sylas. Teach Percy how to make a decent cocktail. For now, though, the main thing that was left was to pick up the pieces.

Vex and Percy made their way back to Whitestone. It almost felt as though nothing had happened in their absence, but of course, everything had happened. Percy checked on his sister, satisfied himself that she would be alright, before joining Vex on her walk into the woods. Velora was asleep – and would be for a day or more, if it was anything like previous resurrections Vex had been witness to. She had had Allura send a message to Syldor, letting him know that everything was okay, and that she would bring Velora back to Syngorn as soon as possible.

That last bit was a bit of a misdirection. Vex wanted to make sure that Velora was okay, that the resurrection didn’t have any adverse side effects, before taking her back. She wanted to spend a few carefree, relaxing days with her last remaining sibling.

Even with Percy at her side, Vex felt more alone than she had in her entire life. It was like a great part of her soul had been torn out, and could never be filled. Keyleth would probably be feeling much the same way, though Vex couldn’t even begin to think how to comfort her, save for lending her Trinket for the night.

It felt just as strange going into the woods without Trinket, who had been a constant companion for so many years. Though she loved the family that had grown around her, she dearly missed the days of sleeping in the woods, just her, Trinket and Vax.

Even now, when they had a magical mansion, and a keep, and a castle at their disposal, sometimes she preferred to spend the night out under the stars, with nothing but a tree canopy between her and the endless heavens.

She could never understand how Percy could be comfortable, roughing it in a frock-coat, and vest, and expensive trousers. Back when they’d been traveling through woods instead of traveling through trees, she had repaired tears for him at least once a week, from where he had gotten his fancy clothes caught on tree branches, or torn by arrows, or slashed by claws. Though he was a marvel with anything mechanical, the intricacies of sewing had baffled him. As a noble, of course, he would have always had other people to do these sorts of things for him. He hadn’t grown up with a seamstress for a mother.

But then, he’d always been surprisingly comfortable with uncomfortable, in spite of his appearances. 

By this point, Vex knew the Parchwood well enough to take them to a spot where there would be minor dangers lurking. Not that there was a single thing in those woods that would be any challenge to two seasoned badasses and a giant bear.

They roasted expensive meats, pilfered from the castle kitchens, over the fire, and lay there, silently. There was not a lot left to say that hadn’t already been said. 

Vecna was gone.

Vax was gone.

Not with a diamond, not with ten thousand diamonds, could they bring him back. The Raven Queen had made sure of that. All the money in the world was worthless when it came to giving Vex what she really wanted. Her family, whole.

She had Percy, of course, and Trinket and Cassandra. Then there was Grog, and Keyleth, Scanlan and Pike. There was Taryon, all the way over in Wildemount, who she was not looking forward to telling what had happened, and Gilmore, who she absolutely was not looking forward to telling what had happened.

All of that would wait, though, for another day. Right now, it was just her, and Percy. 

‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ Vex said, eventually. She had been searching for the right way to say it, the right way to admit how afraid she was of life without Vax. 

The words seemed inadequate, somehow.

‘I know,’ Percy said, simply, after a long, empty sort of silence. ‘But I will be here with you every step of the way.’


	4. III.

III.

The months after Vax’s death – his last, final death – were among the hardest that Vex had ever lived through. The time after learning of their mother’s death had been difficult, of course. Both she and Vax had been overcome with grief and guilt. Grief for the obvious reasons, and guilt because they hadn’t been there.

Not that being there would have helped Elaina survive in any way. At least, then, though, they would have all been together.

There wouldn’t have been any of this heartbreak nonsense.

In the weeks following, she roamed the Parchwood for days at a time, watching Owlbears and Centaurs from a distance, and searching in vain for the juvenile Grey Render that she had orphaned what felt like an age ago.

Percy, she knew, was monitoring the necklace that they all still wore, and would occasionally join her for these lengthy strolls. He didn’t ask if she was okay, or if she wanted to talk about it, which she appreciated. They were the poster-children for bottled-up feelings. He somehow instinctively knew when she wanted to be alone, and knew when she wanted company.

Over time, the wanderings became less and less frequent. Vex found herself rejoining daily life – coming downstairs for breakfast, and participating in her Grey Hunt responsibilities. On occasion Cassandra would join her – though she was a novice with the bow, Vex managed to teach her a few tricks, and within a week or two, she had managed to kill an Owlbear that had been savaging local wildlife. Vex still harbored no small amount of guilt for having killed Cassandra in the final rush to fight Vecna. Though Cassandra did not feel any ill will, Vex still felt it was her duty to help the younger woman – ostensibly her boss- in any way she could.

The dreams about Vax became fewer, and fewer, until it reached a point where her mind accepted the fact that he was no longer a part of her life. Not the living, corporeal he, at least.

She still prayed to the Raven Queen, and to Pelor, in the hopes of talking to his spirit. She still saw the evidence of what he had given them in Keyleth, whose sorrow even now was palpable, and in Velora, who had never lost someone close to her before. She saw it in the eyes of Percy, who was as disdainful of Gods as ever. He would hold grievance with the Raven Queen until his dying days.

Vex, for her part, had accepted it. Accepted in the sense that she knew that she could not bring him back, and that for all that the Raven Queen had taken from them, she had also given them so much time. Without her, Vex would have been torn from her brother’s life a long time ago.

For months, years even, after his death, she waited for the Raven Queen to come, to call her debt due. Vex knew more about Orcus than even the most learned scholars of the Raven Queen. The library in her house was filled with books that she thumbed through twice a week or more, trying to find the best way to kill Orcus. More than anything, though, she used it as a way to take her mind off things, to not let herself fall into the dark spiral of depression that she seemed to every time she thought too much about him.

The library was littered with rolls of parchment, half-baked plans that she had dismissed as ridiculous partway through. Once, after a very long night of reading, she’d had a Scanlan-esque idea of them all disguising themselves as traveling hat salesmen, and entering the lair with an enticing, millinery related offer. For some reason, in this scenario, they were all wearing a different kind of hat.

Some nights, when she had gotten into a rhythm, Percy had come down to remind her to come to bed. ‘It’s after midnight,’ he’d said, and at first she hadn’t believed him, because the last thing she’d remembered was watching the sun dip beneath the horizon.

‘I’m starting to think,’ Percy admitted. ‘That she’s never going to call for us.’ Vex didn’t respond. She had considered that herself, but she wouldn’t let herself fall into the trap of believing in. The second she did, she was sure that a messenger would come, probably in the form of a raven, to send them to their doom.

Where Percy had stored his guns, after they returned from Pandemonium, Vex kept all of her bows in top shape. Percy, she knew, would be content to never have to pick up a weapon again, would be content to tinker with gears and levers and pulleys for the rest of his days. She needed to anyway, as part of her duties as Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt. If the call ever came, she would be ready. 

But the call never came.

It irked her a little sometimes, that her own deal with the Raven Queen was somehow worth less than Vax’s, that she would never have the opportunity to repay the Matron for what she had given, to fully repay Vax for what he had done. It was a complicated sort of relationship with a God that wasn’t really hers. A God that she had never really worshiped, but to whom she had become intertwined. Perhaps not to the extent that Vax’s fate had been intertwined, but intertwined nonetheless.

Percy spent his time building the clock-tower, content with a peaceful life. Every once in a while, Tary visited, and the two of them tinkered around like childhood friends. 

He somehow always managed to know when she’d had a hard day, taking on a horde of trolls, or a juvenile dragon that had made its way into the Parchwood. He would draw a steaming hot bath, select a very nice bottle from the Castle winery, and make sure the bed sheets had been changed. 

He still told anyone that would listen of the time she had single-handedly slain a Nagpa that had been luring hunters to their deaths. She would tell any random stranger that she saw on the street that her husband was the one that was building the enormous clock-tower that had already started bringing in visitors from across Tal’Dorei.

Some days, Vex would stare at it in marvel, amazed at the intricacy, the craftsmanship of the piece. Percy’s clever fingers, that had spent so long forging weapons of death, were just as capable of making magnificent works of art. Her own skills seemed so paltry in comparison. She could fletch an arrow, at a stretch, but that was about it. He asked her for input on ideas, and seemed to take them seriously, but Vex couldn’t quite shake the idea – however folly – that he was merely humoring her. That it was all some big joke, and someone, perhaps Syldor, would come and pull the rug out from underneath her, telling her that she had been worthless all along.

Syldor, of course, hadn’t been the problem in a long time. Since they had left Syngorn, the main problem, had been Vex herself, unable to get out of her own head. She generally found the best way to combat this was to go out into the forest and shoot things. The one thing in the world she knew she was good at.

All those years ago, it had seemed practical to be good at one thing. Now, she felt as though she had put all of her eggs in the basket of being able to shoot, leaving no room for much else. Oh, she could cast a few minor spells, of course, but she was useless at a close range.

Both she and Vax had studied swordplay in the courtyards of Syngorn. Neither of them had been particularly good at it, though Vax was still much more skilled with a blade than she could ever hope to be.

She had thought, perhaps that she should start carrying a sword. It seemed like the sort of thing that the Champion of Pelor should do. The bow had almost been her downfall when she had unexpectedly been caught in melee more than once in previous weeks, leaving her unable to get a shot off in time. There was a nice long scar along her shoulder blade that might fade in a year or two.

The Champion of Pelor, she thought, should be leading armies. They should be at the front of the army, ready to lay down their lives alongside everyone else. They shouldn’t be standing at the back of the fray, hiding behind a pillar after attacking.

‘You need to stop worrying about what you think people want you to be, and be what you want to be,’ Vax would have told her, if he had still been alive. He would have given her a noogie, and tried to make her laugh by pretending to arm-wrestle Trinket. 

She had borrowed a long-sword from the Whitestone Armory, and sparred with Jarett in between his training of the Pale Guard. Like her, he was generally a ranged attacker, but she had seen him fight half a dozen of his men to a standstill with a rapier.

‘Well, better that than having to go and fight a dragon,’ he said, and Vex felt a twinge of guilt. 

Every time her hand gripped the hilt, she thought of the first time she had drawn a blade against someone, the blood the drenched her, the adrenaline that ran through her. The reason why she had never used a dagger or a sword in a fight since then.

Even now, twenty years later, she still had flashbacks to that horrible, horrible night. It was bad enough that every time she was supposed to parry, supposed to thrust, supposed to block with a wooden shield that frankly made her arm ache, she thought about that night.

It did not take long for Vex to decide that this was not for her. She thanked Jarett for his help, and returned the sword to the armory. Pelor, after all, had known what he was getting into. He had chosen Vex’ahlia the archer as his champion. He didn’t care that she didn’t wield a sword. There had perhaps been a little bit of Vax’s voice in the back of her mind, reminding her of that fact.

Even then, not since Yos Varder’s assault on Thar Amphala had a Champion of Pelor been required to lead an army, the result of which they had seen on their journey into the Shadowfell.

That had been six hundred or so years ago. There was not as much in the way of holy armies anymore, and in any case, there were other warriors that could lead them with a blade. 

Otherwise, her time was spent for the most part, fulfilling her duties as Grand-Mistress of the Grey Hunt, felling beasts, and giving orders, and being diplomatic. It had surprised her to find that people joined the Grey Hunt, just for the opportunity to meet a member of Vox Machina, even more surprised to find that they were intimidated by her. It should have been expected; they had, after all, taken down the Chroma Conclave, and banished Vecna, and, closer to home, rid Whitestone of the Briarwoods. 

They all had their admirers, in one way or another. Vex knew for a fact that back in Westruun, Grog received a half dozen or so fan letters weekly. He would read them slowly, painstakingly, stopping at every word longer than five letters to ask for Pike’s help.

The Temple of Sarenrae, in any city you could care to poke a stick at in Tal’Dorei, as well as Vasselheim, were inundated with more worshipers than they could think what to do with, inspired by Sarenrae’s gnomish Champion. Even the Cobalt Soul had seen an insurgence of visitors, much to their dismay.

‘Had enough for the day?’ Percy asked, when she joined him in the study. She had taken off her armor, and put on her dinner clothes. Somehow, Whitestone was similar to Syngorn, in that people seemed to dress differently depending on what time of the day it was.

‘Had enough forever,’ she told him. ‘There’s a reason I don’t use swords.’

‘Yes, it’s not fun, is it?’ mused Percy. He, at least, understood her disdain. He picked up his sword only when necessary. ‘You know Pelor is also technically the God overseeing Whitestone, and by extension the Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt. It’s perfectly alright with him if you only ever use a bow.’

Vex wrinkled her nose. ‘You sound like Vax. Always telling me that I’m already enough.’ Once upon a time, Percy might have feigned insult at being compared to Vax.

‘You are already enough,’ he said plainly. ‘I tell you that every day.’ He kissed her softly on the cheek. She hated that even now, she had to be told a hundred times just to believe it. Not that he always told her in words. Sometimes it was a small, disbelieving smile, as though he could never in a thousand years have imagined that he would be living this life. Sometimes, it was an arm wrapped around her as they slept.

It seemed that they had barely returned from ridding the world of Vecna when the Raven Queen called her chips in. Vex had thought, perhaps that they would have earned some leniency, having just defeated another of her chosen foes. Then, she realized that it had been almost four years since Vecna’s defeat. Four years without Vax that felt like they had gone by in an instant. Every day she was in Whitestone, she spent at least a few minutes in an attempt to commune – mostly with him, but she would settle for the Queen.

There was something about twins, people always said, where they lived inside each other’s minds, could read each others thoughts. Vex had never been able to read her brother’s mind, but she knew him better than she knew anyone else. Sometimes it did feel like they were of one mind, and even now, it still felt like a part of her was missing.

What had once been a constant presence at her side, was now an empty space beside her. Every time she turned around to ask Vax a question, or tried to see how far ahead he was stealthing, and then remembering.

It was late in the afternoon, not long after Harvest Close, and Vex was in what had ostensibly become the armory, restringing her bow. Now that she spent the majority of her time in and around Whitestone, it made sense to have a room to store her bows and arrows and her armor. There was also a safe in the room, that only she and Percy knew about, where all of his weapons were stored. If he were to die, she had instructions to have them destroyed. That was an eventuality that Vex did not want to think of yet. She knew that odds were that she would outlive Percy, but she hadn’t quite finished grieving Vax yet to want to consider the possibility.

There was a knock at the open door, and Vex turned. Percy was standing there, looking a little subdued. Vex was immediately suspicious. He didn’t usually knock. They knew each other’s footsteps well enough that it was hardly necessary.

‘There’s someone here to see you,’ he said. He had his reading glasses on, and a strange sort of look on his face. He accompanied her to the parlor (never had she imagined living in a house with a parlor) where a dark-haired elven woman was waiting for her.

It took Vex several moments to recognize Lieve’tel, cleric of the Raven Queen that had assisted in returning Grog’s soul from Pandemonium. She wondered why Lieve’tel would be here to see her of all people. The Raven Queen knew where to find her. 

‘My matron wishes your presence in her temple,’ the elven woman said. Vex froze. There could only be one reason that the Raven Queen would be requesting her presence. It wouldn’t be to have a nice old chat about Vax.

‘She can’t tell me herself?’ Vex asked, more scathingly than she had intended. After all, she communed with the Raven Queen often enough in the Whitestone temple, or on the bench out in the Parchwood. Not that the Matron had ever deigned to acknowledge her prayers. Still, the fact that Lieve’tel had come all the way from Vasselheim to have this conversation was not a comforting thought. 

Lieve'tel considered her words. ‘This requires a more direct conversation,’ she said, and that alone was enough for Vex to know beyond any doubt the purpose of this “conversation.” Not that there had been any doubt in the first place.

‘Alright,’ Vex said, slowly. Her words were stilted; a little more formal, perhaps, than she would usually use. ‘I will come to Vasselheim. You can expect me there within the week.’ More than likely, it would be less than a week, if she could contact Keyleth. But Vex didn’t want to give the Raven Queen anything more or less than what was promised.

Once Vex managed to contact Keyleth, the druid made it to Whitestone within the hour. She, too, Vex knew, had been waiting for the Raven Queen to call, though perhaps in a more spiteful sort of way.

‘We need to go to Vasselheim?’ were all but the first words out of Keyleth’s mouth. There were greetings, and hugs, of course, but this wasn’t the time for extensive smalltalk. Not now that they had finally received the call to do the thing they had been waiting almost five years to do.

‘To Vasselheim,’ Vex agreed.

The last time she had been to the Duskmeadow, Vax had been with her, and he was the one communing with the Raven Queen. 

This time, she was alone.

Keyleth had insisted on accompanying her, but as Vax had done all those years ago, Vex had asked her to stay outside. Conversely, she had asked Percy to stay in Whitestone. Even though he hadn’t said anything, she knew that he had been frustrated by the request.

Vex loved her husband dearly, but he did have a habit of trying to take command of a situation. No, Vex had made the deal, and she was the one that would see it through. She wouldn’t burden anyone else with the experience.

Somehow, this burden seemed to be one that was hers, and hers alone. She was the one that had made the deal with the Raven Queen, and she would fulfill it alone if necessary. It was unlikely that anyone else in Vox Machina, least of all Percy, would let her do that, but she would do it nonetheless.

Vex followed the Raven Queen’s acolytes (Lieve'tel predictably not among them) up a staircase towards an enormous oak door, with an iron ring in the center.

The chamber that she was led into was enormous – far bigger than Vex had imagined it would have been – with a domed roof of stained glass. In the mid-morning sun, the diffraction of colors was magnificent, but Vex’s gaze was instead affixed on the giant pool of blood in the middle of the room.

The acolytes said nothing, but Vex did not need to be told what to do. With a deep breath, she strode straight into the pool of blood. There was no room for doubt, no room for hesitation. Vax would have walked straight in without thinking, and so would she.

 

In the dreams that Vex had had after dying, she had seen the Raven Queen as a dark, twisted mirror of herself. They had scarcely changed after the Matron had come to collect Vax, a tall figure with dark hair and porcelain mask.

Now, Vex knew, she saw the Raven Queen in her true, Godlike form. Vex was a mere insect in her palm, the goddess literally looking down upon her.

Vex tried to remember all of the things that she had wanted to say, but her words completely and utterly failed her.

‘Vex’ahlia.’ The Raven Queen spoke in a godly sort of voice. ‘I think you have guessed why I have called for your presence.’

‘Well I’m guessing it’s not just to say “hi,”’ Vex said drily. She could have said something even more scathing, like “I’ve been trying to talk to you for four years, and yet when you call, I’m supposed to just drop everything?” It didn’t seem like the place.

Nor did it seem like the place to ask about Vax, and yet she did it anyway. ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me talk to him while I’m here?’ Vex layered her voice with as much charisma as she could muster. She could have sworn that she heard the Raven Queen laugh.

‘I’m afraid it is not the time for that. The time has come for you to fulfil your part of our agreement.’

And there it was. After four years, the other shoe dropping.

It was with a somewhat subdued demeanor that Vex left the temple, finding a concerned looking Keyleth waiting for her.

‘How do you feel about going to the Abyssal Plane?’ Vex asked, in what she hoped was a carefree sort of voice.

‘I’ll be honest,’ Keyleth said. ‘I’m not really a fan.’

‘No,’ Vex agreed. ‘It doesn’t really sound like a good time, does it?’

There were few words exchanged between them as they walked towards the Birthheard. Neither of them particularly felt like spending the night in Vasselheim, even though they still technically had lodging available at the Slayer’s Take.

Vex got a few startled looks from the people as they traversed Vasselheim. Walking around drenched in blood was about as accepted as arcane magic. A couple of guards came to accost them, and stopped the moment they realized who it was that was causing such a scene.

‘My apologies for disturbing you, m’lady,’ he said, bowing clumsily to both Vex and Keyleth. Even now, it was still mildly amusing the reverence that some people treated them with, as though they were somehow more important for having killed Vecna.

They returned to Whitestone without issue, Keyleth retiring to one of the spare rooms they kept ready for any member of Vox Machina who happened to visit.

Vex took a long, hot bath, to wash off all the blood. 

She remembered all those years ago, Vax washing the blood from his body after his first tryst with the Raven Queen.

It was much, much harder to clean her armor, and she was seriously regretting wearing the dragon hide. Blood did not come off of white dragon hide that easily. Perhaps it would be easier to send it over to the castle Armorer for maintenance. 

Then, she went and found Percy in his workshop.

It still seemed strange to come to the workshop and notice the absence of gunpowder. Instead, there were a multitude of wheels and gears, and cogs and other sorts of things that could be used to build a clock.

Percy was hunched over parchment, sketching out hand designs. Vex stopped for a moment to watch him work. His guns, while beautiful in their own sort of way, had not been designed for function over form. The clock-tower, even in its early planning phase, was already proving to be a masterpiece of craftsmanship. The sort of thing he had been wanting to build his whole life, but had never gotten the chance.

‘You don’t have to stand there forever, you know,’ he said, without looking up. Vex wandered over to the desk, and leant herself against the wall next to it. When she didn’t say anything he finally lifted his gaze. The expression shifted quickly from mild curiosity to concern, when he saw the look on her face.

‘It’s time then?’ he said, with resignation in his voice. ‘I thought perhaps that we’d never have to follow through on our end of the deal.’

‘I was starting to think the same thing,’ Vex admitted. ‘But we all know the Raven Queen. Always one to turn the situation to her advantage.’

‘Sounds like someone else I know,’ Percy commented. It was an off-hand comment, probably not meant to be taken seriously, but Vex took a few moments to realize he was talking about her.

‘You think I’m like the Raven Queen?’ she asked. She wasn’t sure whether or not she was supposed to be insulted by that comparison. The Raven Queen, after all, had been the catalyst for so much pain in their lives.

Percy realized suddenly, what he had said, that he was comparing his wife to a goddess that he had great disdain for. ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said, hastily.

‘No, I know,’ Vex said. She waved his unspoken apology off. She knew what he had meant. That she was adaptable, flexible. That she made the best of any situation. That was a consequence of having left Syngorn so young, having to live off of scraps, and sleep in back alleyways.

She was sure that their emotional growth had been stunted in some way by the experience, by the fact that from the age of fourteen to around twenty-six, they’d only ever had each other for company. Of course, the same might as well have been true in Syngorn.

In hindsight, of course, they probably should have learned to spend time apart much sooner. Things might have been less painful that way. They might have been able to let each other go, in the sunken tomb, or after the Water Plane. They might not have made deal after deal, just to spend another day together.

It had been her that made the deal with the Raven Queen, but it had ostensibly been made on behalf of Vox Machina. Now that they had all but retired from adventuring life, she couldn’t force them to join her on the quest to kill Orcus.

Still, it would be just as rude for her to go off on her own, and not give them a chance to join her. For better or for worse, they were still a team, still a family.

‘Playing Devil’s Advocate here,’ Scanlan said, in the sort of tone that made Vex certain that she wasn’t going to like what he said next. ‘What could she do if we don’t follow up on our end of the deal? Because she already has Vax’s soul, so it’s not as though she can take that back.’

It was a fair point, but Vex knew that it wasn’t something that they would be able to get out of that easily. Percy, at least, seemed to be thinking along the same lines as her, judging by the look that they shared.

‘I would think,’ he started slowly. ‘That because Vex is the one that made the deal, the Queen would consider her soul an appropriate price to pay.’ Vex nodded. Now that he’d said it, she thought that was a very reasonable sort of action for the Raven Queen to take. There was a part of her that didn’t feel overly concerned with the idea of the Raven Queen reaping her soul.

‘Well...’ Scanlan started. He shrugged slightly, as though he thought it was a reasonable deal. Vex knew the gnome well enough to know that he wasn’t being serious.

‘I’m not going to force you to come,’ Vex told him. ‘But, you know, it would be nice to have a bit of backup killing a God.’

‘You know, I don’t think he’s actually a God,’ Percy said. ‘Most of the texts I’ve read refer to him as a demon prince.’ He seemed to be doing it out of habit, more than any need to actually correct her. Vex knew, of course, that Orcus was a demon-lord, but that didn’t really roll off the tongue.

‘God, demon prince, same thing,’ Vex shrugged. ‘I mean, he can’t be worse than Vecna, right?’ She remembered reading something, in her vast amounts of research, about Orcus being the one that had taught Vecna the ritual to live on as a lich. Orcus, Vecna, and the Raven Queen; all intertwined in one way or another. The same way Vax’s and her fates had intertwined with the Raven Queen.

‘How many times have we said that one thing can’t be worse than something else, and we all end up dead? Remember Raishan? Remember the kraken?’ Keyleth said.

‘Whatever happened to “we’re Gods”?’ Vex asked, an eyebrow raised. She looked into Keyleth’s eyes and understood that she was not the only one that was still struggling with coming to terms with Vax’s death. Unsurprising, to say the least. Gods, after all, would have been able to bring Vax back.

‘I’m just saying we need to be careful,’ Keyleth said, slowly. ‘I don’t want to lose anyone else.’ It was a fair point. Even with Pike at their side to Revivify if required, they would be going down into the Abyssal Plane. So far, any time they had gone to another Plane, things had gotten pretty hairy. There was a very good chance that one of them wouldn’t return.

But then, there was always that chance. Every single thing they did, there was a chance that one of them wouldn’t return. Not that Vex would ever bring it up in a situation, but even looking for a diamond had gotten one of them killed. Standing behind a sarcophagus had gotten one of them killed.

The closest brush that they’d had with the Abyssal Plane was the goristro Scanlan had summoned to fight Vorugal. 

It was a decision that had been made so that they would never need to set foot on the Abyssal Plane, and now, years later, it was a decision that was potentially going to bite them in the ass. It would be easier to go back, knowing what they were in for.

Unlike the Nine Hells, Vex knew, the Abyss was lawless and chaotic. That was one thing that she remembered from the Abyssal classes that she and Vax were forced to sit through. That, and the correct way to conjugate verbs. There were a dozen different ways of saying “die” depending on how it was that you died. That was one thing that she decided not to bring up during the planning phase of the mission. It wouldn’t do much to settle the general feeling of unease that was spreading through most of them.

‘Could you do a Gate spell again?’ Vex asked Scanlan, still thinking of Vorugal. Wearing his skin every day, she could scarcely forget him. ‘I know I for one, would feel far more comfortable going up against Orcus if we didn’t have to do it on the Abyssal Plane. In his lair.’

‘It’s a pretty high level spell,’ Scanlan said, dubiously. ‘I don’t know it, and I don’t know where we’d be able to buy a scroll. The fact that we found the first one was sheer luck.’

‘Can you duplicate it with Wish?’

Scanlan shook his head. ‘I can only duplicate less powerful spells. We could use Wish to bring him here, but then I’d be completely useless for the actual fight.’ Vex remembered vividly how weak Scanlan had been after using the spell to find out where Grog’s soul had been lost to. He was right; they couldn’t expect him to cast Wish, and then immediately fight Orcus. Even suggesting that they fight Orcus without Scanlan seemed ridiculous; he and Keyleth were their strongest spellcasters, and Orcus seemed like the kind of enemy that would definitely need to have a Counterspell or two thrown at him. 

Even if they did find a Gate scroll, there was a very high chance of failure. Too high, for the put all their eggs in its basket. 

‘The alternative, of course, is to lure him out some other way,’ Percy said. ‘But I don’t think there’s anything, save the Raven Queen herself that he wants badly enough to risk leaving his lair.’

‘I don’t think their battle is the kind that’s fought on the mortal plane,’ Keyleth said. She had been rather quiet for the entire planning session. Vex knew that she was thinking about Vax, about the Raven Queen, and Vex couldn’t deny that her own thoughts had been threatening to wander that way as well. The irony of it was, if they failed, there was a very good chance she would be seeing Vax again soon anyway. She couldn’t deny that there wasn’t a small part of her that wanted that. Keyleth, she knew, didn’t think that way, couldn’t afford to think that way. She had too much responsibility as Voice of the Tempest to throw it all away.

Vex, on the other hand...there were some days – her darkest days – where she felt like she needed to bring herself closer to Vax. Those were the days she took a step back from the world, communed with Pelor, and tried to clear her heart and her mind. It wouldn’t do anyone any good for her to go down a dark path in her attempts to reunite with her brother.

‘I think,’ Vex said, slowly, ‘That if you’re going to come, you all need to know what you’re in for.’

‘When have we ever known everything we’re getting into?’ Scanlan said, which was a fair point. They had gone into a lot of situations that they shouldn’t have completely blind. 

‘Well, yes,’ Vex agreed. ‘But in this case, I’ve done the research, so I can at least tell you, and you can decide whether or not you want to go.’

‘I don’t need to hear,’ Grog said. He had been inspecting his ale cask, and until this moment, Vex hadn’t been sure if he was listening. ‘I’ll go.’

He just wants to fight something, Vex thought, and then admonished herself. That was unfair to Grog, who in many ways, was perhaps the most loyal of all of them. He really did like fighting, though, and perhaps held a little bit of a grudge against Orcus, thanks to his death at K’varn’s...well, eyes. 

‘I’ll go, but I want to hear anyway,’ Percy said, who already knew most of what Vex had discovered anyway.

‘I agree with Percy,’ Keyleth said, sharing a look with Percy as she said it. If Keyleth had said no, that would have scuppered all of their plans in one fell blow. There was no conceivable way that they could get to the Abyssal Plane without her. As with any plan that took place on another plane of existence, Keyleth was clutch.

‘You can’t go without me,’ Pike provided. She was sitting on Grog’s shoulder, putting her well above anyone else in the room. It was true. They couldn’t go without a healer. All the times they’d gone anywhere without Pike, it had ended badly. The Water Plane, the Nine Hells 

Vex looked at Scanlan. He wasn’t holding out, but he still seemed the most hesitant, second to Keyleth. ‘Of course I’ll go,’ he said, in an almost gentle sort of voice. He didn’t even seem to think about it. Vex suspected that he had known since before they’d even started the conversation that he would go. He was taking to the quiet life very well, better than any of them save Percy, perhaps. When the time came – and it certainly seemed to be heading in that direction – Vex knew the bard would be a very good father. The kind he hadn’t been the first time around.

‘So!’ Scanlan slapped his hands against his thighs. The moment had passed. ‘Tell us what we’re in for.’

‘Well,’ she said. There was not an easy way to describe just what kind of horror they were in for. The reading she had done made the Abyssal Plane sound like a very unpleasant sort of place. ‘First, we’re going to have to make our way to the Thanatos,’ she started. ‘which is the layer of the Abyss that Orcus rules.’

‘And what’s Thanatos like?’

‘Oh, it sounds wonderful,’ Vex said, perhaps a little dryly. ‘Lots of tombs, and mausoleums, and dark, twisted landscapes. Orcus himself lives in a black fortress made of bone, called Everlost. Though he does have a secondary lair that he might also be in, in the fortress city of Naratyr.’ 

There was a beat of silence. ‘Tell me about the option where we hand Vex over to the Raven Queen again,’ Scanlan said, though without much sincerity.

She hadn’t even told them the really bad stuff. Like how simply by setting foot on the Abyssal Plane, they all ran the risk of corrupting their souls. With every passing moment, Vex knew, they were all becoming more and more uneasy at the idea of traveling to the Abyssal Plane.

Defeating Vecna seemed like nothing compared to traversing the lawless, unforgiving place where Orcus resided. A place where one, or all of them could become so corrupted that they would never return to the material plane.

But, they had been through so much together. They could get through this.

That night, Vex went to find Keyleth. She found her, as she had suspected, in Vax’s old room in the castle. Or, rather, the room that Keyleth and Vax had shared more often than not.

Vex knocked on the door. ‘Keyleth,’ she said. ‘Can I come in?’ Keyleth did not answer straight away, which was what Vex had expected. ‘Keyleth?’ she said, again, after a minute or two.

‘Yeah, you can come in,’ Keyleth said, hastily. Vex opened the door, and found the druid sitting cross-legged on the bed, having hastily wiped away her tears. The polite thing to do would be to say nothing, so Vex said nothing.

Instead, she sat down gently on the end of the bed, as though a mother coming to talk to her distraught child.

‘Are you alright with this?’ Vex asked, and she did not need to elaborate on what “this” was. “This” was quite clearly the fact that they were marching blindly into the Abyss to fulfill a deal that had already been made obsolete.

Keyleth gave a small sort of sigh. ‘Was I that obvious?’

Vex put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘Any time any one of us mentions the Raven Queen, you start grinding your teeth.’ Keyleth sighed.

‘I trust you – of course I trust you – but I don’t trust that the Raven Queen is giving us everything we need to know about this situation. If Orcus is her sworn enemy, why has it taken until now for someone to go after him?’

‘Fair point,’ Vex admitted. She had been so focused on her own research, on planning how they were going to kill Orcus, that she hadn’t considered that part. After all, the Raven Queen had a number of sworn clerics and paladins in her service. ‘Though, let’s be honest – Orcus isn’t exactly a cakewalk. And we do have a pretty good track record.’

Not to mention, Vex thought, that they had explicitly promised that they would do it. Well, she had, at least. Where she had spoken to the Raven Queen in an effort to bring her brother back, Keyleth had spoken directly to Vax. Had reminded him of the life they’d planned together, of all the things that he needed to come back for.

It wasn’t about the Raven Queen at all. Or it was, but not in that sort of way. 

Vex decided to change tack. She sat down on the edge of Keyleth’s bed, put her head against the other woman’s shoulder. ‘There’s a part of me,’ she admitted. ‘That keeps thinking if we do this, if we kill Orcus, then she might take pity on us and bring him back. But that’s not her. That’s not how the Raven Queen operates. She’s only ever done exactly what she said she was going to do, no matter how it affects us.’

Keyleth didn’t say anything for several long minutes. Eventually, she spoke. ‘I still talk to him,’ she said. ‘Every single day.’

‘I do too,’ Vex admitted. She knew – she had known since the day that he died – that she would never stop talking to him. ‘I still cry myself to sleep sometimes,’ she admitted. Keyleth looked at her, surprised.

Truth told, she had good days, and bad days. The good days, where she was mostly okay, where she could get through her responsibilities without stopping to think of what was missing from her life. Occasionally, she think of something, and turn to tell him, only to find he wasn’t there. The bad days, where from the moment she woke, she was hyper-aware of the hole in her heart, where she thought about how afraid he must have been, even if he didn’t admit it, how much she missed him, how much emptier her life is without him. The days where every time she caught a glance of herself in a mirror, or saw the long scar on her right forearm from where he’d accidentally pushed her out of a tree when they were four.

It wasn’t as raw, or as painful as it was in the months after it had happened. When some days, she wouldn’t even leave her bed for the utter grief that had overtaken her. Percy had known better than to rationalize, and would bring her food and comfort.

Not a single person in the world, save Percy knew about the bad days. Even he didn’t always know the extent of them – like the days she feigned a headache, and didn’t leave her bed. He probably suspected, of course, but he didn’t know the whole truth of it.

These days, it wavered mostly somewhere in the middle of good and bad. There were still random moments when she burst into tears for no reason, and almost every day, she went to the bench in the Parchwood, and spoke with the ravens that flocked there.

‘I think,’ Vex said, finally. ‘That if I do this, I might get some kind of closure. That I will be able to finally close the book on the Raven Queen, and not have to think about her again. Only him.’ 

The words seemed to comfort Keyleth somewhat, even if Vex wasn’t sure how true they were. She was sure that for the rest of her life, she would be unable to extricate her thoughts of Vax from her thoughts of the Raven Queen. Without her, their lives would have been completely different.

Without the trap on the sarcophagus in her champion’s tomb, Vax’s life especially, would have taken a very different path. Even though it was Vex that had died, she thought that there wasn’t a great deal in her own life that would have been different, save for losing a brother. Which, now that she thought about it, was a pretty big change. 

What she had meant, was that until his death, her life would have continued in much the same way, until there had had been no Raven Queen with which to make a deal to bring him back. All things considered, she was grateful for the extra time, if nothing else.

The next day, they went to Vasselheim to make their preparations. For some reason, a condition of their quest was that it start in Vasselheim. Perhaps so that the denizens of the Raven’s Crest could keep an eye on them.

Vasselheim looked in much better condition than the last time Vex had been there, but even after four years, there were still signs of Vecna’s army and its assault on the city. 

When they reached the Raven’s Crest, it became clear why they had been required to journey there. Lieve'tel was dressed for travel and for combat.

‘Vex’ahlia,’ the Elven woman greeted her. Vex didn’t flinch; she didn’t particularly disdain the other woman in the same way that Keyleth did, but she was still wary. ‘I hope you are amenable to my accompanying you on this journey. You are giving my mistress a great boon.’

Vex stared at her. ‘Let’s be clear,’ she said. ‘We are fulfilling our end of a bargain that was made almost five years ago. While I am personally grateful for the things she has done for us, please don’t confuse it for a personal favor.’

‘Of course,’ Lieve’tel said, smoothly. ‘I have something that will make our task easier.’ She handed Vex a scrap of brownish leather. Confused, Vex took the piece of fabric. It was filthy, and worn, and smelled utterly disgusting. ‘It’s a piece from Orcus’s loincloth,’ which Vex really wished she would have said before she had smelt it.

Grimacing, she put the scrap in her bag, knowing they would be able to use it to find Orcus once they reached the Abyssal Plane.

Vex was not sure why the cleric was so keen on accompanying them to the Abyssal Plane. She had done her duty by joining them in the search for Grog’s soul. She didn’t need to do anything else. 

Truth told, it made Vex feel a little apprehensive; that an envoy of the Raven Queen was watching them, judging them. As though she might renege on her deal, if she found their execution to be lacking.

That was not the only reason that Vex was uneasy in Liev’tel’s presence. The dark, ravenesque aesthetic reminded her so much of Vax that she did a double-take every time she saw the cleric out of the corner of her eye. It upset her that even after so long, her brain had not quite let go of her brother.

Vex shared an uneasy look with both Percy and Keyleth as they gathered in a circle. True, Lieve'tel had been invaluable in retrieving Grog’s soul, Vex still couldn’t quite say that she trusted the Elven woman. Admittedly, though, the extra help would be welcome, giving that Orcus could have anything nefarious waiting for them.

From her component pouch, Keyleth pulled the forked iron rod that she had tuned to the Abyssal plane. After the near disaster of Pandemonium, she kept several of them on her, all in different places, mostly attuned to the Material Plane, though a few, Vex knew, were attuned to the Feywild.

Vex closed her eyes as Keyleth cast the spell, but felt the pull as they were yanked from the Material Plane, through that familiar tunnel of darkness, before they landed heavily and haphazardly in what Vex hoped was the Abyssal Plane. Immediately, Vex cast Pass Without a Trace.

They couldn’t guarantee that the denizens of the Abyss had not noticed the loud and noisily violent spell that was Plane Shift. It all depended on where they had ended up on Thanatos.

Just as she was the quietest of the group, she was also the most perceptive. She cast her gaze out over the Plane to see if anything out there had heard their presence.

They were standing in a crater, as though they had come crashing down from the sky, instead of transported from another Plane of existence.

There was low-lying scrub for as far as the eye could see; unlike the small patches of scrub that dotted the Dividing Plains, this scrub looked ugly, and sick, as though it had been burned to the ground, and the only thing that remained were the skeletons of a once fertile land. Or perhaps, being the Abyss, it had never been fertile, just the twisted result of death and chaos.

If anything had heard them, it would be making a bee-line for their current location. They had to move away quickly, before talking stock of the situation.

After about a short struggle of trekking through unforgiving, brambly bushes, they found a series of over-sized boulders that they had a short rest amongst. Though they had been moving for less than an hour, they were all covered in tiny, painful cuts where uncovered by armor.

They were safe, for now. 

Vex held her bow half-way ready while Keyleth scryed. Lieve’tel had offered to complete the ritual, but desisted at the withering look that Keyleth gave her. Still, it was good to have two spellcasters capable of Divination magic. 

Keyleth’s eyes opened suddenly, as she finished the scry. By this point in their adventures, Vex could generally tell by the look on Keyleth’s face whether or not a scry had been successful. She would either have disappointed resignation, or excited determination. 

Today, thankfully, it was determination. Orcus had not detected the scry.

‘Or,’ Keyleth said, ‘He did, and decided to let me go through with it.’ Vex looked at her, startled.

‘I didn’t know people could do that,’ she said, frowning. It made sense. It gave Orcus the element of surprise; they wouldn’t know that he knew that they were coming. Or something like that. ‘Well, we’ll just have to assume that he knows we’re coming.’ She had, admittedly, been operating on that mindset anyway. A worst-case scenario sort of thing.

‘He’s in Naratyr,’ Keyleth told her. ‘I saw the walls and the carpets of the room he was in. Rotting flesh and human hair.’ She grimaced slightly. 

The lair in Naratyr, Vex knew, was the far more difficult of the two places to get to. They would have to get to Naratyr, first of all, and then make their way through the city undetected by the undead. It was not a busy city, from what she had managed to glean from the books, but that only made their situation more precarious. If it was busy, it would have been easier for them to blend in.

To even get to Naratyr, though, they would have to cross the icy moat that surrounded it. It was a task that might have been daunting when they had first started as a group, but now, with so many members capable of flight, it was a mere trivial nuisance. More worrying would be the trek of indeterminate length through an unpredictable hellscape.

‘Good,’ Vex said. ‘Great.’ She swallowed a bit of the nausea rising in her throat, and looked around her; there was no sign of any landmark that might give hint as to the right direction. ‘Isn’t there a spell you can do that tells us how to get there?’

‘Find the Path,’ Keyleth said, in the sort of way that made Vex certain that there was some caveat. ‘But I can’t cast it without something from Naratyr. I could Commune With Nature, but he has to be within three miles.’ Vex pulled from her bag the scrap of leather that Lieve'tel had given to her. The cleric, who had clearly been eavesdropping on the conversation, gave a knowing sort of nod.

‘I might be able to help you with that first bit,’ Vex said, handing Keyleth the scrap. ‘This is from Orcus’s…This is from Orcus,’ she said. Keyleth looked at her a little warily, but took the leather, and rummaged in her component pouch for the remainder of the components needed to cast the spell.

Within five minutes, they were moving in the direction of Naratyr, a day or more’s travel away, according to Find the Path. Definitely not within three miles.

It was a long, hard slog to reach the outskirts of Naratyr; it seemed like it had been an age since they had done something like that; nothing but walking all day to get to the next town. Of course, none of those towns had been in the Abyssal Plane.

They had reached a point where they could see Naratyr now; see the ominous bone-castle, still at least a dozen miles away.

When Scanlan popped out the mansion, Vex was grateful to be able to take off her boots and armor, and have a bath. 

Over a (frustratingly vegan) dinner, everyone was too tired to talk. Their tentative plan was to make their way as close as possible to the castle tomorrow, before spending another night in the mansion.

Vex went to bed as soon as dinner was finished. She was bone-tired in a way she hadn’t been in a long time. She tried to keep her eyes open, to stay away for Percy to come to bed, but the next time she had a conscious thought, it was morning.

‘You’re lying,’ Vex said, when Percy told her.

‘Darling, when have I ever lied to you?’ Percy asked, which was a dangerous question. He seemed to realize this, because he quickly added, ‘Since we’ve been married, I mean.’

Vex brushed off the question, conceding that of course, he was probably right. They went downstairs to the dining room, where Lieve'tel, Scanlan and Keyleth were eating breakfast.

It was another long day of travel; though they weren’t far from Naratyr as the broom flew, the bramble made for slow travel, and it was near the end of what could be considered the day when they finally reached the moat on the city’s outskirts.

They made a brief stop to plan their crossing, and to eat and drink. Vex drained her waterskin for what felt like the tenth time that day. The fact that they had two clerics with them capable of creating water was a veritable godsend.

For the simplicity of their crossing, it seemed to take a long time to figure out; Vex and Percy on the broom, Keyleth as a giant eagle, Grog and Lieve'tel on the magic carpet, and a polymorphed Scanlan carrying Pike.

They made their way slowly through the city towards the enormous bone castle at what might have been the city center. Keyleth had cast Find the Path again to get them there, but it was hardly necessary now that the castle was looming so ominously in front of them.

Vex stealthed ahead, the rest of the party sixty or so feet behind her. It felt so strange to do this without Vax by her side. They might have bickered under their breaths, threatening to draw the attention of any dangers that loomed ahead. Now, there was just dead silence. She knew that he would have done things differently, perhaps taken another route, or used the edge of his boots a little more. He would have noticed the traps a little earlier than she did, and had a much greater success at disarming them. 

Still, they managed to make their way through without suffering any damage. Naratyr was an eerily quiet place, which unnerved Vex more than she liked. The quiet, though, was better than when it became very much not quiet, with random battles of merciless undead cropping up randomly from time to time. They didn’t seem to notice Vox Machina’s presence, or if they did, they didn’t care to stop fighting to deal with it.

It helped, of course, that Scanlan had cast Seeming over the entire party, making them look like just another group of undead moving through the city. Even if they did get into a fight, then, it would seem completely normal in the unpredictable streets of Naratyr.

There was a ball of screwed up anxiety in Vex’s chest as they kept moving. Her entire body was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For whatever thing they had been missing to hit them in the face.

It was a feeling that continued well into the night, after Scanlan had conjured the mansion, and they had all settled down to rest for the evening. She was glad he had decided to come; even though she would never admit it to him, the whole endeavor would have been a lot harder without him.

It was a blessing that, unlike in the Nine Hells, they had Scanlan and his mansion. This did not seem like the kind of place where it would even be possible to find a quiet place to rest for the evening, let alone an actual inn.

‘I don’t like this place,’ Percy admitted. They had both been lying awake for some time, not talking, but not trying to sleep, either. Vex wasn’t surprised at his confession. This wasn’t the sort of place you could make deals to get out of. This was the sort of place that anything looking at you funny would sooner kill you and eat your corpse. Words were useless.

‘You just don’t like not being able to negotiate your way out of something.’

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘Plans come a little easier when we can use diplomacy, or trickery. I’m concerned that the fact that this will be a...straightforward sort of plan.’

‘Go in, fuck shit up, then leave?’

‘Precisely,’ Percy said. He sighed, loudly. ‘My god, Grog will be very pleased with the simplicity of this.’

‘Grog being pleased with something means that we should all be very worried,’ Vex mused.

‘There is always another possibility,’ Percy said slowly. Vex could tell immediately that she wasn’t like what he was going to say. ‘I could call upon the third pact of the contract with Ipkesh.’

‘I can’t believe I have to tell you this,’ Vex said, with as much grace as she could muster in the face of her husband’s overwhelming lack of self-preservation. ‘But I’m not going to let you call on your deal with one devil to try and defeat another one.’

Percy opened his mouth to say something, but Vex beat him to it. ‘Yes, I know he’s technically a demon-lord, alright? I’m still not letting you do it.’

‘You realize I am an adult capable of making my own decisions,’ he said, but there was no heat to his words. Still, he didn’t wither under the daggers that she shot him with her gaze. Then again, he was one of the few that never did.

‘Let’s try again,’ Vex said, perhaps a little more scathingly than she had intended. ‘If you call upon that deal, then in twenty, or thirty, or forty years when you die, I will be the one that has to go and rescue your soul from the Nine Hells, and I don’t particularly want to do that.’ She could have mentioned that not all of the decisions he had made in the past had been good ones, but refrained.

‘I wouldn’t ask you to do that.’ For a second, she thought he sounded sheepish, but then she remembered that Percival Frederickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III had never been sheepish in his entire life. Even when eating crow, he somehow found a way to make it sound as though whatever he had done was what he had intended all along.

‘You wouldn’t,’ Vex agreed. ‘But you know I would do it anyway, because I can’t stand the thought of your soul being tortured for all eternity.’ Percy was quiet for a long moment.

‘I forget sometimes,’ he said, his voice low. ‘that we’re in this together now.’

‘Darling, how could you ever possibly forget, with me nagging you about it all the time,’ Vex smiled. Any potential rising tension had settled, but the thought still loomed over her head that perhaps Percy would call on the third pact anyway. He did have something of a habit of acting as though he was the smartest person in the room, and ignoring anyone else. Usually, she conceded, he was the smartest person in the room, but he didn’t always make the smartest of choices.

‘Do you really think I’ll be dead in twenty years?’ he asked, and it took Vex a moment to figure out what he meant.

‘It was a figure of speech,’ she told him, resisting the temptation to roll her eyes. ‘I’m sure you’ll live longer than twenty years. Twenty-five, perhaps.’

‘I wasn’t even expecting to live this long,’ he said, then, at the look on her face, he added, ‘But I’m very glad that I did.’

There was a long pause. ‘I thought Pike had the contract anyway,’ Vex said, remembering.

‘Oh yes,’ said Percy, in the sort of voice that told Vex that he had absolutely remembered that Pike had the contract, and that he’d been thinking of ways around that obstacle.

‘Did I tell you that the Drow Goddess Kiaranslee used to rule here,’ Vex said, apropos of nothing. Percy seemed mildly startled by the sudden change of subject. ‘She temporarily deposed Orcus, but then he returned to drive her out. She fled to another layer of the Abyss.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Percy, and he meant it. Every single bit of useless trivia that Vex had found while studying Orcus he had been intrigued by. She had a feeling he would have been intrigued by discovering what Orcus had for breakfast, apart from the souls of the innocent.

Their own breakfast was markedly subdued. There was always an air of tension playing, when they were preparing for such an important battle. It had happened before Vecna, before Thordak...Whatever happened, Vex would be glad when this day was over.

‘I feel like we probably shouldn’t just barge right in the front door,’ Scanlan said, half an hour later when they were all standing around outside the Castle of Bone.

There was a unanimous agreement. Vex shot up on her broom, Scanlan behind her, looking fruitlessly for some kind of window, some kind of opening. This wasn’t the sort of place that had windows, however.

There was a small back door, high and out of the way, with the most complicated lock Vex had ever seen. If Vax were here, it would have been no trouble at all.

‘Remember that lock you picked in Ioun’s library to get the Tome of Isolation?’ Scanlan reminded her. ‘This is child’s play compared to that.’ The words gave Vex the burst of inspiration and courage that she needed for the lock to click open. Scanlan grinned. ‘Told you so.’ Vex gave him a playful shove, the kind she might have given Vax. She missed having Scanlan and Pike and Grog nearby. Westruun wasn’t far, admittedly, but it was far enough that she sometimes went months without seeing her friends. They would have to work on that. Building lives outside of Vox Machina didn’t mean they had to stop talking altogether.

They stealthed their way through the castle, Vex twenty or so feet ahead of the rest of the party, and Keyleth giving directions at every junction. Vex didn’t particularly like how empty the halls were, the same emptiness that had engulfed the streets of Naratyr. It made her feel as though she was missing something. They did run across a few errant undead, most of which were dispatched quickly, but it was less than two hours before they found themselves at an enormous door, with the Demon Prince of Undeath waiting on the other side.

She felt Lieve’tel’s hand at her back. ‘No,’ she said, almost immediately. ‘No, I don’t want it—give it to someone who needs it more than me.’ After all, she had the Dawnfather’s blessing. It wasn’t a lot, but it would at least give her some resistance to whatever Orcus was going to throw at them. 

Lieve’tel was a little surprised, at first, but nodded. She went to Keyleth, as Vex had suspected she would. After all, in one way or another, Lieve’tel was still a conduit to the Raven Queen, and to Vax.

She wondered if Lieve’tel had spoken to Vax, since...since then. Whether being a worshiper of the Matron allowed you to communicate with her dead Champions. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to convert, just for that.

But no. After everything that had happened, while she had dealings with the Raven Queen, her faith was with Pelor.

She worshiped quietly, a little unfocused, never quite finding a God that fit, until Pelor. What better God for a ranger than the God of the land and the sun? At first, she had thought him too unwilling to hear her words. How long had she spent underneath the Sun Tree, trying to commune with him, trying to find out what he wanted her to do. It had been a long and difficult day that even now, she remembered every detail of.

How much easier would that have been, if her faith had come a little easier, a little earlier. It had taken the overwhelming sight of the celestial beauty of Sarenrae on the Island of Renewal for those little puzzle pieces to click into place, and the Blessing of the Dawnfather for that seed to finally start to grow. He told her then what he hadn’t told her under the Sun Tree; that he was there, that he could hear her prayers for guidance.

Even the necrotic resistance he had gifted her with, seemed a subtle way of saying that he had been watching all along; the number of times she had almost died to necrotic magic (fucking Delilah and her Finger of Death), the two times she had died to other sorts of necrotic magic.

Orcus was at least twelve feet tall, with massive wings – bigger than Vax’s had been. He had two stumps on his head, where she presumed the Horns of Orcus had once sat. One was in a vault in the Platinum Sanctuary. The other...well, that was a problem for another day. His way of inflicting his vile undeath upon the world.

With a single thought, the light of the Dawnfather emanated from Vex like a lighthouse. It still took a little getting used to; after all, you couldn’t very well hid behind a pillar when you had the light of a thousand suns bursting through you. Somewhere along the line, she had made an unconscious decision to walk in the light, instead of amongst the shadows.

Perhaps it had been around the time that she had decided for certain that she would stay in Whitestone, remain as Baroness of the Third House, and Grand-Mistress of the Grey Hunt. After all, it wouldn’t do for someone of that stature to be skulking around alleyways. Not that much skulking could be done in shining white armor.

No longer was she hiding in treetops, hearing whispers from afar. She was a shining beacon of Pelor.

‘I have been waiting,’ Orcus snarled, his voice growling and demonic. ‘The pawns of the Raven Queen!’ Vex was a little indignant at being called pawns, even if it was somewhat accurate. They were, after all, doing her bidding.

Before any of them managed to do a single thing, an army of skeletons rose up within the lair – fifty or more of them, bearing down on the party clustered around the entrance. ‘Pike!’ Keyleth yelled. The cleric was already preparing to Turn Undead. All but a dozen or so simply turned to dust before them.

Vex fired two arrows immediately in Orcus’s direction, the first a crapshoot of a Bramble Shot, that he would surely be able to shake off without issue, which he did. The second shot barely pierced his arm, small sparks of lightning playing along to seemingly little effect.

It always seemed to be the way with gods, or with god-adjacent entities. Immunities to non-magical weapons, making her all but useless.

As always, Scanlan, Keyleth and Pike would be their heavy hitters. Vex managed a couple of shots with the Blazing Bowstring, which seemed to do nothing compared to the Fireballs and Guiding Bolts that she saw blast Orcus from our of the corner of her eye. Even the spells – or at least the fire spells, seemed to not do as much damage as Vex would have expected.

The radiant damage, however, did seem to have an effect. Not more than it normally should, but enough that it seemed to be taking a toll. The problem was that the only reliably way Vex had to give radiant damage was for her to be attacked herself. 

To her left, Percy fired off two shots into Orcus to the same effect as Vex’s arrows. Swearing, he changed his target to the few remaining skeletons.

‘Is this all you have, you meddling bitch?’ The words were directed, Vex knew, at the Raven Queen, rather than themselves. The tail that swung around to meet her, though, was definitely not directed at the Raven Queen, and Vex couldn’t quite manage to roll out of the way in time. The point of the tail somehow found the gap between two dragon scales, and a burst of poison seemed to burn through her. She cried out, and a burst of radiant energy erupted from her, but Orcus wasn’t even paying attention. He had already moved forward to attack Scanlan with his wand. The gnome reeled viscerally from the two swings, the barest amount of the impact being absorbed by armor.

The skeletons now dispatched, Percy took half a dozen more shots with Animus, following it up with a healthy burst of lightning energy from Cabal’s Ruin. 

Across the room, Pike cast Sacred Flame, radiant fire raining down on the snarling demon-lord. Orcus retaliated with a snarling finger pointed in the Cleric’s direction, that seemed to do far less damage than it should have.

Seething, Vex let off two more shots with the Blazing Bowstring, the combined lightning and fire damage enough at least to draw Orcus’s attention. With the way he kept turning back to face her, she wondered if he knew that she was responsible for their agreeing to slay him. 

Orcus pointed his finger in her direction. Fuck. She could not dodge the familiar blast of cold death energy that hit her, but this time, it seemed to hurt a little less than the last. This time, the power of Pelor’s blessing fought against it; while it didn’t negate the spell completely, she was still, at least, standing. Eat shit, Finger of Death, she thought.

He snarled at her, clearly angry that his spell hadn’t worked. She fired two arrows that seemed to do nothing, before trying to run for a bone-hewn pillar, but he was too fast for her. His club – at least as big as she was – swung with immense speed, and when it hit her, she felt the wind knocked from her completely, and the agony of half a dozen broken ribs. She coughed, and blood spluttered from her mouth onto the hair-carpeted floor. She felt the familiar sting of necrotic damage, lessened by Pelor’s influence. He seemed to shrug off the burst of radiant damage that hurting her did to him.  
She tried to pull back, but he was already swinging again. She heard Percy’s voice, as if from a thousand miles away, calling out her name. 

She was still standing, barely; her heart was pounding, her chest was a dozen points of agonizing pain, and blood dripped from her mouth, her nose, her ears. Through glazed eyes, she vaguely noticed his tail coming around to deliver the killing blow. 

Not even Pelor’s protection had been enough to save her.

There was darkness around her, for what seemed like an age. It could have been months, or years, or decades that passed, before she saw a pinpoint of bright light. She half-expected to see the heart of Orcus’s lair once more, to wake up with Pike, or perhaps Lieve’tel at her side, but no.

This is it, she thought to herself. There’s no more coming back.

This was completely different to the other times that she had died. The other times had just felt like bouts of unconsciousness. She mightn’t’ve even realized that she had died, unless someone had told her.

This time, she knew she was dead.

Knew that this could be it, that they might not be able to bring her back, after so many times.

It was darker than she had expected. Being Pelor’s champion, she had expected to have been brought to the Fortress of the Sun. Instead, she was here in this dark, empty place. The place that she should have gone the first time she died, and yet could not remember. Or, the place she had only ever seen in nightmares, cold and lifeless.

Though she had never been here, she could tell from the general feel that this place, whatever it was, was under the purvey of the Raven Queen. The goddess that had both given and taken so much.

‘Haven’t you taken enough?’ Vex spat. She was angry. No, more than that, she was livid. Livid that the Raven Queen had become so interwoven in their lives, livid that Vax had been taken from her so young. It would have been better that he had never made the deal. Better that she had died in the Sunken Tomb, and the Raven Queen never intervened. For someone that hated the undead, the Matron seemed very fond of letting people come back to life when it suited her purposes.

It was those strange, dark feelings again, that she had felt the first time she had died in the presence of the Raven Queen. Now, come to think of it, was probably the first time she was truly alone in the Queen’s presence.

‘Why didn’t you take me?’ she asked, this time a little less angry, a little more sad. She wasn’t expecting an answer. She wasn’t expecting anything except for the Raven Queen to stare at her, silently. ‘What is my fate?’

‘Your fate is to live,’ said a cold, whispering sort of voice. Vex didn’t know how to respond to that. ‘As for why he was chosen. He was chosen because he was willing.’

There was a long, silence-filled pause that Vex didn’t dare break. Finally, the Raven Queen spoke again, and her words were the ones that Vex had been longing to hear.

‘Would you like to see him?’

Vex bit back a sarcastic retort. There was a time and place, after all, for sassing a Goddess. 

‘Yes,’ she said, finally. Her voice was a whisper, so soft that no-one should have heard it, but the Raven Queen heard everything.

The dark form coalesced into a familiar figure. A figure that she hadn’t seen in a long time, and thought she would never see again. A figure that she sometimes thought she saw out of the corner of her eye, when looking in the mirror, or in her dreams, when she could pretend that everything was okay again.

Vax.

‘Hey, Stubby.’ Vax smiled a sad sort of smile. He put an ethereal hand on her shoulder, only it wasn’t ethereal. He was there. He was solid. Or, rather, she was ethereal, too. In any case, she could touch him.

Vex was beyond speech. ‘Vax,’ she breathed. She had never thought she would see him again. Or at least not for a very long time. After a few seconds, she managed to put her thoughts into words. ‘Are you here to take me to the other side?’

‘It’s not your time,’ he told her, gently. ‘You have your whole life ahead of you. But, I just wanted to say hello.’

‘While I’m here,’ she added.

‘While you’re here,’ he agreed. ‘But please don’t come here again. At least not for a while. Four times is too many times.’ Vex didn’t disagree. A pause. ‘I can’t believe you fought a God for me.’

‘Well, you sold your soul to a God for me. I couldn’t let you have all the fun.’ She put a hand to his cheek, and tried to commit the feeling o memory. Every year, on their birthday, every time she thought about Trinket with all of those bows in his fur, every time she saw a dagger, she would remember this moment. ‘I miss you,’ she said. I need you, she didn’t say.

‘I miss you,’ he replied. He moved his hand upwards, and mirrored her gesture. They stood there for a moment in silence, but the silence said more than any words ever could.

‘I want to stay,’ she said, and perhaps she even meant it.

‘Not now,’ he told her. ‘Your time will come, and I will be here waiting for you. But until then...’ He trailed off, almost wistfully.

In the back of her head, she heard Percy’s voice, calling her back. Though it did not seem to be out loud, both Vax and the Raven Queen had a shift in their demeanor; they had both heard it too.

‘It’s time,’ Vax whispered, and he was smiling. ‘Give Keyleth my love.’ 

Vex rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘I’m not going to kiss her, if that’s what you’re asking.’

Vax gave a playful shove. ‘Kiss Freddie for me instead then.’ Those were the last words he managed to say, before the world seemed to shift away.

‘I love you, brother,’ Vex said; she knew that her words had not carried, but he had heard them anyway. Not heard with his ears, but felt it in his heart, the same way she had felt him say it. ‘Hey,  
she called after him, realizing suddenly as the light seemed to change. ‘I never got those fucking boots!’

Around her, the darkness slowly turned to light. Vex’s eyes were still closed, but a darkish-red light was pressing in on them, letting her know that wherever she was, it was light. She squeezed her eyes briefly, before opening them.

She was lying on a table, surrounded by candles. Everything hurt. Everything ached. She blinked once. Twice.

Oh yes. She had died, hadn’t she. Her conversation with Vax hadn’t been just a fever dream. She had been somewhere not quite on the material plane. Somewhere just on the edge of the other side.

There were voices around Vex, talking to her, perhaps, but she could not process them. She stared upwards at the ceiling – a very familiar looking ceiling. It was the Temple of Pelor, in Whitestone. She had spent long days in this temple, her duty as Pelor’s champion. She wondered if Pelor and the Raven Queen had had a little chat.

A hand squeezed hers, and she turned to see Percy holding it. He seemed to breath a sigh of relief. She noticed, then, that, though she was still wearing her armor (which bore the pinkish tinge of blood that had been hastily cleaned away), Percy’s navy blue frock-coat was wrapped around her shoulders. Even still, the cold bit into her, and she suppressed a shiver.

‘Good to see you again, darling,’ he said. ‘We were a little worried for a moment.’ From Percy, that might as well have been him rolling around on the ground, screaming in agony.

Vex looked around from her prone position and saw all of her friends. Pike and Scanlan, Grog and Keyleth, and, currently bounding towards her with ecstatic joy, Trinket. Percy did not quite manage to hold him back, and Vex was immediately set upon with a series of licks and gleeful moans.

Vex laughed. ‘Some clearly more than others,’ she said.

‘He carried you,’ Percy said, simply. ‘After you....He carried you back.’ Vex scratched Trinket behind the ears, as he continued to lick her face.

‘Demon-lords.’ She smiled, weakly. ‘My only weakness.’ Percy didn’t say anything. She wasn’t used to that. He hugged her tightly, and she could see the tears streaked behind his glasses. ‘Thank-you for bringing me back,’ she said. ‘But please tell me you didn’t make a deal with some all-powerful being.’ Or call upon the third pact.

‘No, just Pike.’ Pike gave a very small sort of wave. She looked tired. They all looked tired.

‘Oh, good. I’m a little bit fed up with traveling to extra-dimensional planes just to fulfill these bargains.’ It was something they seemed to do quite a lot. Hopefully something that they would not have to do ever again.

She tried to sit up, but was overwhelmed by the rush of blood to her head. Percy put a hand to her shoulder as she lay back down. The hand was still shaking slightly.‘Can you help me, darling?’

‘Of course,’ he said, simply. Vex wondered if those were the fewest words she’d ever heard him say. He put an arm around her, and helped her move into a sitting position. As though they had been waiting for this, the rest of them rushed in, and pulled her into a group hug.

Vex didn’t move, didn’t speak, just let her friends hold her for a few wonderful minutes.  
‘We thought we might have lost you,’ Keyleth said. ‘After the Revivify failed...’ Vex understood. She had seen Pike bring enough people back mid-combat to know that it was a stressful process, even more so when it failed.

‘I had a few people I needed to speak with is all,’ Vex said. Keyleth’s eyes widened slightly at these words, but Vex did not elaborate. She was far too tired, far too drained to want to explain now. What she wanted was a bath. No, not a bath; that could wait. Food could wait, except maybe something to tide her over until the next day. What she needed was sleep.

Percy caught her expression. ‘Would you like to head back up to the castle?’

‘More than anything,’ Vex said. She was half willing to try and walk there herself, but that was vetoed almost immediately by Percy, and then once again by everyone else. When she tried to do it anyway, her legs collapsed out from underneath her, and she fell to her knees. Which was how Vex found herself meandering slowly through the streets of Whitestone atop the back of an enormous armored bear.

Trinket seemed to take it as his life goal to move as slowly and as carefully as possibly, so as not to shake her off, and soon Vex found herself nodding off. She awoke briefly just in time to see Percy and Keyleth tucking her into bed, her bow and her armor resting against the bedside table, Trinket standing watch by the door.

‘Good night,’ she murmured, but she was sure that it came out as an unintelligible mumble. Percy kissed her on the forehead.

‘It’s four o’clock in the afternoon,’ he said. Vex smiled. She went to respond to him, but her body was no longer listening to her brain’s commands. She contented herself with simply squeezing his hand, just to let him know that she was still here.

She fell asleep before he’d even left the room.

She dreamed of Vax. She dreamed of Vax, and the Raven Queen, and of Orcus. Though she had been just lucid enough to hear Percy confirm that they had manage to kill Orcus, he still haunted her dream, horrific wand in hand. It slammed into her, again and again. She saw Grog and Keyleth overwhelmed by hordes of undead, saw Scanlan and Pike crushed by titanic skeletal arms. Saw Percy, once again corrupted by the machinations of a demon.

She slept for a long time. So long, that it was daylight again when she woke, perhaps midday, judging by the way the sun shone through the half-open curtains.

The other side of the bed was empty, and even though the sheets were crumpled, it didn’t look like Percy had spent the night there. Instead, it was more likely that she had slept violently, as she always did when she had nightmares. More than once, while camping in the woods, she had almost fallen out of a tree thanks to nightmares.

Trinket was fast asleep by the door, and Vex found herself sneaking past him. He clearly needed the rest, and she didn’t fancy the attention just yet.

She had one of the servants draw her a bath. ‘Please don’t tell Percival that I’m awake,’ she said, and the maid looked at her, a little startled. She wanted an hour or so without having to think about what had happened. To clear her head, and sort through the things that she knew had happened, and the things that had happened in her dreams.

Vex soaked lazily in the bath for about half an hour. Not quite as long as she had planned, but long enough to clean off all the filth of the Abyssal Plane. The bathwater was filthy by the time she had finished, but she no longer smelt like death, which was certainly a plus. The towel she used to dry herself started off white and fluffy, but was soon covered in muck. 

She bypassed her armor completely; she needed one day at least, where there wasn’t a chance that they would get into a fight. In any case, it would need to be cleaned properly; she was sure that there was still bits of rotting flesh that had made its way into the armor’s nooks and crannies.

The closet in their bedroom at Whitestone Castle was filled with fine clothes that she rarely seemed to get a chance to wear. For the most part, they were practical, rather than fancy, and she wondered vaguely when she had reached the point where fancy didn’t matter as much. 

She dressed very slowly in a teal-blue tunic, and dark brown pants. Her hair was loose across her shoulders, and she made a mental note to get Vax to braid it. It took a few moments for her to remember. It was a blow, but every time, it hurt a little less. It would never stop hurting, but maybe one day, it would be a dull ache rather than a stabbing pain. The hole in her heart – well, that would never go away.

She could braid it herself, of course, but she always liked the way he had done it. Despite the ridiculous amount of sleep she’d had, the mere act of lifting her arms to brush her hair took far more effort than she would have liked, so she let it hung loosely, wet curls sticking a bit to the back of her shirt.

She remembered when Percy had died the first time; it had taken several days for him to return to his full physical ability. Mentally, of course, was another story altogether. They all still had scars from that day at Glintshore, and the day with the glabrezu, and the day with Raishan, and the day on the Water Plane, and all those other days. So many deaths that they would never, could never forget. Deaths that she would carry with her for the rest of her life. For all the good they’d done, they still bore all the scars.

One scar in particular felt like the knife was still stuck in her chest, a wound that could never close no matter how long passed since his death. He was fated to be the Raven Queen’s champion, to die and serve in her name, and she, well...she was fated to live.

At least, that was what the Raven Queen had said. It was such a vague sort of thing; fated to live. She might as well have been fated to breathe, or to wake up in the morning. Fate and her, they didn’t exactly get along.

But, if it meant that her fate was to get married, to grow old, to have children, grandchildren, and all the rest, well...that wasn’t entirely bad.

Vex made her way slowly downstairs, to where Percy and Cassandra were in the dining room, finishing up lunch. They both jumped immediately when they saw her, Percy rushing forwards like a nervous teenager on the first date.

‘I didn’t think you’d be up for a while,’ he said, apologetically. As much, at least, as he could sound apologetic. It was one of those subtle things that you picked up on after you’d known him for a while. ‘I would have brought lunch to you.’ There were at least half a dozen servants, and yet he would have brought her lunch himself. That was one of the reasons why she loved him.

‘No, I wanted to stretch my legs,’ she said, but the legs felt leaden and heavy. She sunk down into an armchair and watched as Trinket settled himself down on the floor in front of the empty fireplace. Still a little sluggish, she hadn’t even noticed that he had followed her downstairs. He seemed attached to her by an invisible leash, as he always seemed to after a strenuous battle. Especially the times that she’d died. ‘Where is everyone else? Are they still in Whitestone?’

Percy rubbed his forehead. He put his hand at the back of her chair. ‘For now, yes. They didn’t want to leave without making sure that you were alright.’

‘Well, I’m fine,’ Vex said, leaning back, and resting her legs on Trinket’s armor. The bear shifted slightly under her weight.

‘You know, we are married,’ he reminded her. ‘You don’t have to lie to me. I know what coming back from death is like.’

‘Yes, I was there, darling,’ she told him, dryly. ‘Both times. How about we have some lunch, and then you can tell me about how you all avenged my death with screams of heartbroken fury.’

‘Gladly,’ he said. They had bacon and eggs and toast in the parlor, soon joined by the rest, who, it soon became clear, had been told by Percy that she was awake, but had wanted to give the two of them some space.

‘How’re you feeling?’ asked Keyleth, straight to the point as ever.

‘Tired,’ Vex said, which was absolutely the truth. Not even twenty straight hours of sleep had been enough to restore the smallest amount of energy. ‘But, obviously, grateful. Thank-you, Pike.’ She smiled at the gnome, who leaned up and gave her a tight hug.

‘Please don’t do that again,’ Pike murmured. It was the same thing she said almost every time, and yet they all always seemed to keep dying on her. It must be difficult, Vex thought, to have to bring them back every single time.

‘That’s the plan,’ Vex told her. Privately, she thought that if there was a next time, there would be no coming back from it. Vax was right – four was too many times. ‘What happened?’ she asked, and there was an uncomfortable sort of silence. It was always an uncomfortable moment, telling someone what happened after they died. Even after all they times they had all managed to die, that part didn’t get any easier.

‘Well, you died,’ Grog said plainly. He sounded a little confused, as though trying to figure out how Vex had managed to forget that.

‘Yes, Grog, I was there for that part,’ Vex said, gently.

‘Well, you killed Orcus as you died, do you remember that part?’ Percy asked. He looked the smuggest she had ever seen him. He knew, of course, that she didn’t remember that part, and he was absolutely relishing being able to be the one to tell her.

‘No, I must have lost that bit.’ Vex frowned, trying to piece together what had happened before she’d seen that final swing of the club coming towards her. She had fired an arrow, and then…

And then nothing.

And then pain, and dark, and light. The light, she knew now, had been the Blessing of the Dawnfather; that burst of radiant energy that had been responsible for Orcus’s death. Orcus had struck her down, and Pelor had taken him down in kind.

‘You took him down,’ Percy corrected her. Vex hadn’t even realized she’d said anything out loud. ‘You were the one that activated the Blessing, after all.’

Vex waved off his rationalizations. She was no longer at a point in her life where she needed to be the one to get the kill. It was always fun, of course, but there were more important things going on.

‘Did I miss anything else?’ Vex asked, suppressing a yawn. She had barely just woken up – how could she possible be tired again?

‘Grog nearly got killed by a sentient weapon again,’ Scanlan offered, almost as an afterthought to the rest of the conversation.

‘What? Again?’ Vex asked, incredulously. There were only so many times you could pick up a weapon and almost been destroyed by it. After Kas and Craven Edge, this made three. Perhaps they needed a system in place to have weapons Identified before Grog picked them up.

‘Yes,’ Percy said. ‘That’s the problem with fighting evil people; they have evil weapons. But that is a problem for another day. I’ve had it put in the Whitestone vaults. For some reason, I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep the Wand of Orcus and the Horn of Orcus in the same place.’

‘Understandable,’ Vex agreed. She would hate to have gone to all of that trouble, only for Orcus to resurrect himself in the Platinum Sanctuary. Though, she wondered, with Orcus dead, whether the horns still held any power. It could be that there was now simply a pile of dust in the Hall of the Exalt.

‘And we also found some ancient hero’s soul,’ Keyleth said, holding up what looked like one of the soul stones that they discovered in the City of Dis.

‘I think I remember reading about that,’ Vex said. ‘That may help us with the thing in the vault.’ She stretched her whole body, trying to rid herself of the aches and pains that had been ever-present since the Abyssal Plane. ‘But again, problem for another day.’

‘I’ll put it on the list,’ Percy said, dryly. Vex sighed, internally. She couldn’t believe they had a list again. Everything they did just ended up adding more to the list. At this rate, they would be adventuring well into their retirement years. Eventually, they would have to pass on the legacy to their children.

‘Anyway, after the killing and the looting and the stopping Grog from losing his soul was done, we Plane Shifted back,’ Scanlan concluded. ‘Ran straight to the Temple of Pelor, and Pike did her—amazing magic, and, well, you know the rest.’ Vex frowned at the slight disconnect in his words, but she did not sense any dishonesty. It seemed like less than a day had passed since the killing blow was dealt.

‘Well,’ Vex said, with a happy sort of sigh, that was only partly put on. ‘I’m very glad to be back.’ It wasn’t entirely a lie, but it wasn’t entirely true, either. 

They had expected, she knew, for her to say something about what she had seen on the other side, whether she had heard their voices, their offerings calling her back. Vex found it difficult to admit that she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. Wasn’t ready for the difficult conversation about what and who she had seen.

‘Did you hear anything?’ Keyleth asked. She had a strange sort of sound in her voice. Vex could tell just from looking that the other woman had been crying.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I didn’t hear what any of you said. All I heard was the sound of Percy’s voice.’ It was the truth. Maybe not the whole truth, but the truth nonetheless.

‘So true love brought you back,’ Scanlan said, in an amused sort of voice. Vex did not quite have the energy to give him a playful shove, so she gave him a look that intimated one. Still, he wasn’t entirely wrong. It was the need to be here, with the rest of her family that had brought her back.

‘Do we need to go back to Vasselheim?’ Keyleth asked. ‘To tell the Raven Queen that the job is done?’

‘No,’ Vex said, perhaps a little too suddenly to not arouse suspicion. ‘She knows.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Scanlan, shrewdly.

‘Because I spoke to her.’

‘Did you speak to—’ Scanlan started, before Pike cut him off with an elbow to the ribs. Vex didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. Not yet. For just a little while longer, she wanted her last conversation with Vax to be just her own.

The others seem to get the very strong hints Percy gave that she needed to rest, for which Vex was both grateful and a little resentful. She hadn’t been this exhausted all of the other times she had died. Of course, all the other times, it had been just needed quick Revivify to get her going again. 

When she woke, it was daylight again – she though that had only been an hour or two, and it took a lot of persistence from Percy to convince her that she had slept the night through.

‘Keyleth had to go back to Zephrah for a few days,’ he told her. ‘But she says she’ll be back as on Yulisen or so.’

Vex frowned. She barely had any idea what month it was, let alone what day. ‘It’s Grissen,’ Percy told her, seeing the expression on her face.

‘Thank-you,’ Vex said, forcing herself to smile. It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy. Moving her muscles just took a lot of effort.

Vex spent the rest of the day cleaning her armor properly, and checking over Fenthras, and doing all those boring maintenance sort of things that had to be done after a wearing adventure. Even after several direct strikes from the Wand of Orcus, her armor had fared reasonably well. Dragons were hard to kill for a reason, after all. It was she that had taken the brunt of the impact, she gathered; while Percy and Pike and even Keyleth were loathe to talk about it, Grog quite happily told her how smashed up she’d been, and how many ribs she’d broken.

‘All of ‘em,’ he said, munching on his fourth turkey leg, while she wiped down the armor, cloth coming away pink with blood. She had sent it over to the castle for cleaning after returning from Duskmeadow the last time. She thought perhaps it might give the wrong message about the sorts of things she was getting up to if she sent it down again. As though she was only doing them to make sure they were keeping busy. ‘You were all smashed up, bleeding from your mouth, and your nose, and your ears.’ He paused. ‘We were really worried.’

Her undertunic was bloodied and torn and had been completely wrecked, to the point where it wasn’t even worth trying to salvage. Luckily, she had several more in rotation, though hopefully it would not be needed for at least a little while. These days, their battles were fewer and further between.

While Vex was sure that Fenthras had taken some of her blood splatter in the fight, the bow had either repelled or absorbed the liquid. In any case, its visage was free from stains, and, as she had found after previous encounters, rarely seemed to need much maintenance at all.

Still, she restringed it, and checked that all of its magical properties were still working. Grog wanted to spar, by which he meant “shoot arrows at me, and I’ll try to hit them with my bloodaxe,” but Vex’s heart wasn’t really in it. Not because she had any lingering emotional thoughts over dying – she had died enough that it was sort of par for the course. No, it was what had happened while she was dead that she was still mulling over. 

Leaving a disappointed Goliath in the armory, Vex made her way back upstairs.

True to her word – or at least, Percy’s word – Keyleth returned to Whitestone early on Yulisen afternoon. Vex hadn’t realized just how anxious she’d been about the arrival, until Percy put a light hand on her clenched fist as they finished a late lunch.

Though Vex had not yet told him what had happened – they hadn’t even spoken about her death since that first day – he seemed to have a shrewd idea of what she was anxious about. How she started every time Keyleth’s name was mentioned, how she had deliberately avoided the bench in the woods, how she spent all of her time doing things that would take her mind off what had happened.

He asked for her help in the workshop a few times, not because he needed the help, but because he knew that focusing on painting intricate details of dragon scales, and making gears, and various other minutiae would keep her occupied. Hopefully no-one would ever notice that Umbrasyl’s wings were a little lopsided.

‘I’m going to finish up in the workshop,’ Percy said, with a long pause, more than likely for Vex to lodge any protest she might have had at this course of action. Vex caught Percy’s gaze over the back of Keyleth’s head. He gave her a slight nod. Though she hadn’t said a word to suggest it, her wonderful, brilliant husband had clearly figured out what had happened, and where she had gone, and what she wanted to do. There was no protest. This would all be easier if it was just her and Keyleth. Vex nodded back, and he gave her a swift kiss on the cheek, before leaving the room.

Then, it was just Vex and Keyleth. Vex decided that she better get things over with, before her nerves got the better of her.

‘Hey Keyleth,’ she said. ‘Want to take a walk?’ 

‘Sure,’ Keyleth said, a little surprised. It had been a while since they’d had a “heart to heart,” in any sense of the word. It was harder on Keyleth, that Vex’s grief had taken the form of retreat and isolation. It had suited her to spend time with Percy, because his grief worked in much the same way.

The last thing she ever really wanted to do was talk about things. Talking about things rarely seemed to make them better; at least, they never did for her.

Of course, she had spent time with Keyleth, and they had actually gone on a few solo adventures together, mostly in and around the Parchwood, or the Summit Peaks. “Druid and ranger, back to nature,” Keyleth had joked. They had certainly always been a bit more comfortable in natural surrounds than the rest of Vox Machina.

Vex had her bow slung across her chest, as she did whenever she entered the Parchwood these days. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it dangerous, but there were enough things in there that would give you trouble if you weren’t prepared for them. She supposed it probably was dangerous for people that didn’t have years of combat experience. 

In any case, it was her duty as Grand-Mistress of the Grey Hunt to deal with any threats they happened to see on the way. Between her and Keyleth, anything that gave them trouble would be dead in seconds. There weren’t too many Vecna’s or Raishan’s wandering these parts.

They took a long, winding path through the forest, nothing but silence shared between them. The only creatures that even thought about bothering them were a couple of wolves that thought better of it after Vex fired an arrow at one of their heads. She eventually brought them back around to the bench that Pike had erected, the bench that she had so carefully avoided these past few days.

Even after that, it took a long time for Vex to say what she wanted to say. To find the right words.  
‘When I...died,’ she started, slowly, and Keyleth’s eyes widened. She hadn’t quite figured out where the conversation was going, but she clearly hadn’t expected the topic. ‘I saw her.’

‘The Raven Queen,’ Keyleth said. She seemed to have an inkling now, a sad, fearful sort of look in her eyes. ‘Did she—’ Keyleth started, and then stopped when she realized that Vex had more to say.

Vex nodded. ‘And...well, he was there as well.’

Keyleth leaned into her, head pressed into Vex’s shoulder. She gave a soft sort of heave. ‘How was he? What did he say?’

‘I mean, he was...He was Vax. He wanted to say hello, and he...he wanted me to give you his love,’ she said. Suddenly, it seemed like hardly anything. ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s not much; we didn’t have much time, but...’ She trailed off. ‘It was very important to him that I tell you that.’

Keyleth squeezed her hand. Vex started a little – she hadn’t noticed that her hand was even being held. ‘Thank-you,’ Keyleth said, through strained tears. ‘It’s...it’s enough.’

‘Plus, he wanted me to kiss you – like full on make out, but I didn’t think you’d really like that.’

Keyleth laughed. ‘Liar.’ She rested her head against Vex’s shoulder, and they sat on the Raven Queen’s bench for a long while in silence. Eventually, Keyleth stood. ‘I might head back up to the castle,’ she said. Her eyes were still wet with tears. ‘I have to be up early tomorrow.’ Vex recognized the lie for what it was, but didn’t question anything. Keyleth had always been a terrible liar.

‘Of course,’ Vex smiled. ‘If it’s alright, I might stay a bit longer. I’ll be up early to say goodbye before you leave’

She sat alone for a good while, taking in the sounds of the Parchwood. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that she was back in the Verdant Expanse, on the edge of Byroden, giggling as she found a hiding spot at the top of a tall tree, where Vax would never find her. They would play on the edge of the forest for hours, never traveling too deep. Horrors lurked deep in the Verdant Expanse. Somehow, they had never found them. They’d found enough horrors in other places of the world.

The light was slowly dwindling away, when she heard the footsteps crunching on leaves. They were familiar footsteps, of the only person she really wanted to see right now.

‘Hello, darling.’

Percy sat on the bench next to her, and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She leaned into him, much the same way that Keyleth had done to her.

‘I spoke to Keyleth,’ he said, a little unnecessarily. Vex could have gathered that from the expression on his face alone. ‘Are you alright?’ It wasn’t often that he asked questions like that. All too often, they relied on non-verbal communication, a hug a little tighter than normal, or a delayed smile. Reading each other had become such second nature that they rarely had need for those sort of questions.

‘I’m always alright, darling,’ Vex said. It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it wasn’t exactly a lie, either. She had her moments of not being okay, but she was used to being able to push through them, or to push them down. ‘I saw Vax, on the other side.’ It seemed pointless to deny it. It was not as though it had been a private conversation. She had said everything anyone would have expected her to say.

‘It was good to see him,’ Vex admitted. ‘It’s easier, knowing that he’s waiting...you know...there.’ 

Percy didn’t say anything. He wasn’t a religious person. He didn’t pray to any Gods, or take stock in their values, or anything like that. He kept his distance from it all. But, he accepted that she believed, even if not as strongly as Pike, or as faithfully as Vax. She visited the Temple of Pelor beyond her capacity as its Champion, and the Temple of the Raven Queen as tribute to her brother as much as anything else. Faith was just another way in which she could negotiate her place in this world.

‘You could have stayed,’ Percy said. It was a question, more than it was anything else. What he really meant was, what brought you back?

‘Vax is there,’ she told him, and took his hands and pressed them against her chest. ‘But my heart is here.’ You are here.

He leant down, and kissed her hand.

‘We have no more Gods to fight,’ he told her. ‘No more dragons, or vampire lords. We have to resurrect an ancient hero to destroy a wand, but I imagine that killing Orcus was the hard part of that endeavor. When you die, your hair will be grey, and your skin will be wrinkled, and you will be surrounded by, hopefully, a good number of grandchildren.’ Vex laughed. She thought that he might perhaps be getting a bit ahead of himself. ‘And when you get to the other side, he, and I imagine I, will be waiting for you.’

‘How about we start with the children, and then think about the rest a little way down the road.’

‘Deal,’ Percy said. 

And they sat together on the Raven Queen’s bench at the edge of the Parchwood, and watched the sun go down.


	5. IV.

IV.

It was almost a year and a half before they fulfilled that promise, just before Winter’s Crest. It was snowing heavily outside, and the wind was picking up. This was the time, Vex knew, that the veil between the planes was the thinnest. 

It had been a long, difficult pregnancy, and Vex had been bored out of her mind on bed-rest for the past two months. The first three pregnancies had ended before they had even really begun, to the point where Vex questioned whether the lifestyle they had led over the years was coming back to haunt them.

She couldn’t imagine, after all, that dying and being revived three times was good for the longevity of her body. This time, they had clerics on call around the clock, just in case anything looked like it might be going wrong. Both Vex and Percy had held their breath until the fourth month, and then settled just slightly. This time, things seemed to be running smoothly, which was a godsend. Vex wanted to start this family so much, she didn’t know what she would do if it failed.

Though Percy hadn’t taken any part of it, Vex had prayed to Pelor more than once, asking necessarily for a child, but for a healthy and happy family. She wasn’t sure that he had any influence in that sort of field, but it seemed more likely that he would be able to help than the Raven Queen.

While she could still move around freely, Vex had visited the Raven Queen’s shrine, and communed with the birds that roosted there. As always, they seemed little more than mere ravens, who had been drawn to Whitestone through powers unknown. Their presence comforted her in many ways; while they were there, she could pretend that Vax was there with her.

It was in this, more than anything else that had happened since they had defeated Orcus, that she missed her brother’s presence. Even now, years after his death, she still had a hole in her heart that nothing could ever fill. She loved Percy dearly, but husband and brother were very different things. It was a hole that she would have to live with, unfilled, for the rest of her life.

It was a hole that, admittedly, she wasn’t noticing as much in recent days, due to the now enormous pressure on the rest of her body.

It was just like a Vax’ildan to be causing her so much grief. She had read her way through all of the books that Percy had brought up from the library, ending with some truly dire ones that she had half a mind to burn once she was done with them.

Percy had taken to lying by her side as he worked on clocktower designs. It was, as he had promised it would be, a long-term project. He would be working on it for the next decade at least. 

Presently, he was sketching out designs for five chromatic dragons, detailing the fight of Vox Machina against the Chroma Conclave. He was struggling a bit with the designs, since ancient dragons apparently involved a lot more moving parts than regular people. Who would have guessed.

The pain, when it came, was early in the morning. Early enough that it pulled her from sleep, and woke Percy with her loud gasp.

‘Is it time?’

Vex wasn’t sure. Twice before, she’d had painful contractions that had turned out to be false alarms. It was so early that she didn’t want to wake the clerics, only to send them back to sleep.

‘That’s what we’re paying them for,’ Percy said, and Vex realized that she had voiced her concerns out loud. She conceded that his point was a good one. He didn’t even bother to put a nightgown on over his flap-bottomed pajamas, as he ran from the room.

Just as they returned, she felt another sharp, agonizing pain. A flash of white crossed her vision for a moment, and she gritted her teeth against a scream.

She had thought, foolishly, that once it all started, it might have been over quickly. But nothing about their lives had ever been quick or easy.

The contractions continued well into the late morning, by which point Vex was tired, sweaty, and numb from all the spells and potions that the clerics had given her. In the few minutes of brief relief she had, she let her eyes drift to the window.

There was raven nestled in one the branches of the tree right next to the castle. It seemed unfazed by the wind lashing at it relentlessly, unfazed by the snow that whipped across horizontally. It held her gaze for several moments, to the point where Percy, gripping her hand tightly, was worried that the cleric had numbed her a little bit too much.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked. Vex pulled her attention away from the raven, and looked at her husband sharply.

‘Percy, do you perhaps need a subtle remind of what’s happening down there right now?’ she asked him, scathingly, at which point she was wracked with a sudden, if slightly dulled pain, as felt another contraction. She gritted her teeth, and squeezed Percy’s hand. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, after it had passed, but that was something of a lie. She wasn’t used to the kind of sustained pain that kept coming, even after a spell or a potion. It had taken several tries to put an overwhelmed Trinket into the necklace, as he had been intent on bashing down the door to be by her side. It was something that she should have done earlier, but admittedly, she had not expected to be giving birth so soon.

There was another burst of pain, and instead of white, this time she saw a flash of dark that looked unnervingly like ravens’ wings. It seemed so real, that she thought someone else must have noticed it, but Percy’s eyes were locked onto her. He didn’t notice either, the dark figure standing in the corner of the room. A familiar, dark figure.

He was smiling.

‘Vax,’ she breathed, and a wave of agony washed over her. She couldn’t quite stop the scream from coming, and welcomed the potion that one of the clerics poured down her throat a second later. She expected the figure to vanish, a hallucination brought on by pain, or exhaustion, or delirium, but the figure remained. There were tears in his eyes, and there were tears in her eyes, but that was a given. 

A pale, shaking hand reached out towards her.

Vex tried to pull her hand away from Percy’s, to reach hers out, too, but a female voice in her ear dragged her back to reality. ‘Okay, Vex’ahlia, are you ready to push?’ Her eyes snapped back to the corner, and the dark figure was gone. 

A choked sob escaped her lips, and Percy squeezed her hand once more. ‘Its almost over,’ he said, unaware of the true reason of her despair. 

Another long, painful hour passed before Vex held her son in her arms. His hair was dark, his eyes pressed closed. His ears came to a very, very small point, almost unnoticeable if you hadn’t been told he was a quarter-elf. There were not a great number of half-elves in Whitestone, or indeed, a great number of elves. But, as the son of two high-ranking members of nobility, Vex’ahlia would make sure that no-one would ever treat him differently because of the shape of his ears. She didn’t think they would, even without their intervention. This wasn’t Syngorn after all.

‘He’s beautiful,’ Vex murmured. Neither of them had failed to notice the raven-dark hair, or the roguish sort of smile. What Vex hadn’t mentioned was the flash of wings she thought she’d seen, in between screams of pain, a dark shadowy figure standing in the doorway of the room. A brief glimmer of the Raven Queen. Or, of a servant of the Raven Queen. She wanted to stop, to talk to the figure, but things were a little too chaotic for that.

‘He’s ours.’ A pause. ‘Did you ever think we’d get here?’

‘Over the last twenty-four hours? No, I thought it would never end.’ It wasn’t a lie. She had known that it would take a long time to give birth, but it had been worse than she had anticipated.

Percy smiled, but it was a wan sort of smile. The cleric had healed her, but she was still overcome with the sort of exhaustion that only a good night’s sleep could cure.

‘I know we haven’t talked about names,’ she continued. ‘But...’ She trailed off, unsure of quite how to say what she needed to say. She found, however, that she didn’t need to say it. Percy, like on so many other occasions, knew exactly what she was thinking.

‘I think it suits,’ Percy said. ‘Though here’s hoping he’s not as reckless as his predecessor.’ Vex could have made a comment about someone else’s recklessness, but decided against it. ‘He has big shoes to fill.’

In that moment, Vex couldn’t have cared less whether her son would live up to the deeds of his predecessor. Her expectations mattered less than whether he was happy, and safe. Her son could have spent the rest of his life baking pies, or mending clothes, and it wouldn’t matter, if that was what he wanted to do.

She refused to make the same mistakes as her father.

‘As long as he’s happy, I don’t care,’ Vex said. She was sure that in five, or ten, or twenty years, that would change, that she would want to see something more, but for now, that was enough. ‘I don’t want to put expectation on him.’

Carefully, they went downstairs together, to where the rest of their family was waiting. Keyleth and Cassandra both stood, before they had even made it halfway down. Percy took their son, to show him off to the waiting crowd, and Vex sat down heavily on the chair, wincing a little. She popped Trinket out of the necklace, and the bear immediately set upon her, clearly confused by the fact that the large bump that had been her stomach just hours before was now gone.

It took a few tries to cast Speak With Animals, her body still overwhelmed with tiredness. ‘Hey buddy,’ she said, warmly. ‘Do you want to meet your brother?’

‘I have a brother?’ Trinket pawed the ground a little nervously in his confusion, resulting in his claws rending across the Marquesian rug.

‘You remember, I told you I was having a baby,’ she said, scratching the bear underneath his ears. Trinket leaned into her touch.

‘I remember,’ he said. He had spent a good amount of time over the last few months resting his head against her stomach, and sniffing her daily.

They had to wait until Percy had made the rounds with everyone else, before Percy gently passed their son over to Vex, who leant down towards Trinket. Trinket took his time, sniffing carefully, before saying, with some finality. ‘He smells good.’ That was high praise from Trinket. Trinket didn’t like anyone unless they smelled trustworthy.

‘Trinket approves,’ Vex said, perhaps a little bit triumphantly.

‘I’m so glad,’ Percy said, with a smile. ‘You’ll forgive me for saying, but if there was an issue, you know whose side I would take.’

Vex didn’t know what she would have done if there was an issue. Well obviously she knew what she would have had to do, but she would have felt terrible to have to do it. She had had Trinket for so long, it would have felt unconscionable to give him up, or even sequester him in Raven’s Slumber. Even still, it would be a long time before young Vax’ildan would be old enough to roughhouse with the enormous bear. Vex still couldn’t bring herself to call him “Vax.”

‘He’ll make a good babysitter,’ Vex commented. Percy stared at her for a full second, before he processed the tone of her voice. ‘Do you really think me so irresponsible that I would let a bear look after our son unaided?’ she asked, incredulously.

Percy didn’t answer straight away, which was as much of an answer as Vex needed. She trusted Trinket implicitly, of course, but there were some things you didn’t leave alone with your newborn son, and an eight-hundred pound armored bear was one of them, regardless of how well-behaved he was.

‘Can I hold him?’ Grog asked, and Vex was a little surprised. She hadn’t expected Grog to be so interested in a baby that couldn’t yet hold a sword. She wasn’t sure why she was surprised, though, because Grog somehow always managed to surprise her.

Vex carefully passed the baby over to Grog, and had to physically stop herself from hovering underneath him, just in case.

Vax’ildan seemed happy now, being doted on by his de facto aunts and uncles. In Grog’s arms, he seemed so tiny, but the Goliath held him with such care that Vex couldn’t help but be impressed. ‘Can he have some ale?’ Grog asked, making to reach for the Bag of Holding.

‘No,’ Percy said, quickly, moving to intercept before Vex had even processed the question. ‘No, he’s only drinking milk right now.’

‘Oh,’ Grog said, a little disappointed. ‘I think I can get the jug to do milk,’ he said, though clearly his mind was still set on the ale.

‘Not that kind of milk, Grog,’ Vex told him. He frowned, confused.

‘Oh,’ he said, and a rare light of understanding hit Grog’s eyes. He looked down at Vex, somewhat nervously.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘From my titties.’ Grog didn’t ask any questions after that. He was still reeling at the revelation of where baby’s milk came from. He patted Vax’ildan gently on the back, and passed him over to the impatiently waiting Keyleth.

It had been just weeks ago now, when Vex, heavily pregnant had asked Keyleth if she would be okay with them naming their child Vax’ildan. After all, in the end, he had been Keyleth’s as much as he had been Vex’s, even if Vex had known him longer.

‘I just assumed you would,’ Keyleth had admitted. ‘You don’t have to ask my permission – it’s not as though I’ll get the chance to use it any time soon.’ There was no bitterness in her voice; it had been almost five years since Vax’s death, but when your lifespan was a few hundred times that, it felt like nothing. 

Now, holding Vax’ildan the second, there was a light in Keyleth’s eyes that Vex had not seen in some time. A happiness that they had been devoid of since that day in Vasselheim. Vex wondered if her own eyes were the same.

Vax’ildan stared upwards in wonder at the floating flowers that Keyleth had crafted. Snowdrops. Vex gave a teary sort of smile.

‘He’s already in love with Keyleth,’ she whispered to Percy under her breath. ‘Definitely a Vax.’

‘Now, now,’ Percy said. ‘We don’t want to be putting expectations on him.’ Vex gave him a playful shove, but she was so weak – in general, and from exhaustion – that he didn’t budge even the slightest.

‘He may have to go by “Dan,”’ Vex said, frowning. ‘Y’know, to avoid those expectations.’ Percy furrowed his brow.

‘Dan De Rolo,’ he said, seeming to consider it. ‘I don’t know, it sounds so common.’ Vex elbowed him lightly in the ribs. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that.’

They had, of course, discussed the notion of nobility over the last few months. Of walking the fine line between making sure that their son never wanted for anything, but also making sure that he didn’t end up like the nobility in Syngorn, thinking that anyone who wasn’t of the right blood was somehow lesser.

Though they had been staying in the castle for the last few months, they had plans to make a full-time abode of the house that Vex had built, even if it wasn’t necessarily the most “humble” of houses.

Taryon had been a little disappointed to learn that his bedroom would become a nursery, but thrilled at the arrival of “another fine little elf boy.” Vex took the intent of the words to be endearing, rather than condescending; Tary had matured considerably since being reunited with Lawrence. They had both visited several times over the last year, and had promised to do so again once the baby was born.

The next day, they requested Eskil Ryndarien, just as crotchety as ever, Send a message to both Taryon and Syldor, which the Realmseer did with no small amount of complaint.

‘How is he not dead yet?’ Vex muttered, as the old man walked away slowly.

‘He keeps himself alive on spite alone,’ Percy replied. Nonetheless, the message clearly went through, because not two days later, the delegation from Syngorn arrived. The delegation being Velora, Syldor and Devana.

Velora was thrilled to be an auntie, and had brought a multitude of gifts from Syngorn. So many that she couldn’t carry them all, and the overflow had fallen to a resignedly amused looking Syldor. He certainly looked far more relaxed than Vex had ever seen him as a child. Age and marriage, and the removal of the stick out of his behind seemed to have mellowed him.

There was something of a sadness in his eyes as he held his grandson. Something approaching regret, Vex thought. She didn’t have the energy to comfort him in the way that he needed comforting. Even after everything they’d done to repair their relationship, there were some things that she couldn’t quite forgive. Or, if she could forgive, she couldn’t quite forget.

One thing that was sure was that her son would certainly have a happier childhood than she had had.

When Syldor and his family left, Vex was almost grateful. Not because she hadn’t enjoyed their company, but because getting up three or four times a night had left her far too drained to be properly entertaining company.

Now, it was just the rest of her family left. The family that had been with her to hell and back, literally, and figuratively. 

‘We’re all going to have to teach him a few things,’ Scanlan said, almost proudly, watching Pike painstakingly attempt to coax some divine magic out of Vax’ildan (‘Now say “Guiding Bolt up the butt!”). ‘I, for one, can teach him to play the lute. Grog?’

‘I will accept this managemental task,’ Grog said, solemnly. ‘I will teach young Grog to read.’

Vex opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She didn’t quite have the energy to say what she wanted to say. Thankfully, she had Percy there for that.

‘We would expect nothing less from the Grand Poobah,’ Percy said, dryly. ‘Grog de Rolo will be nothing less than the finest scholar Whitestone has ever seen, under your fine tutelage.’ Grog stared, his brain clearly taking a few moments to process the words. While it was clear that he didn’t quite understand all of them, he seemed to get the gist of the message. Fortunately, he missed the sarcasm.

Sarcasm aside, over the next few months, it became abundantly clear that Vax’ildan utterly adored being doted on by such a collection of family and friends. His favorite by far was Zahra, who took great pleasure in casting Thaumaturgy at every available opportunity, and whose horns were a source of intense curiosity. A close second was Taryon, whose shining Helm of Brilliance dazzled everyone in the room.

Every morning, Trinket was waiting patiently at the bottom of the stairs. The bear was no longer allowed upstairs, as his patience was far overshadowed by his unbridled enthusiasm. While he was very careful in the proximity of the nursery, he had knocked over several priceless vases in his attempts to get there. Some days, before she had really woken up, Vex could hear the loud, pitiful sort of moans from the attention-starved bear.

‘Well, this is generally what happens when a younger sibling is born,’ Percy said, holding Vax’ildan well away as Vex gave her bear a well-deserved belly scratch. ‘The older one feels like he’s being replaced.’

‘Trinket doesn’t feel like that,’ Vex said, admonishingly, but she made a mental note to ask Trinket later, and resolve to set a little bit of time each day to spend with him. ‘He just wants to play with his brother.’

Trinket, to his credit, was as careful as Grog, when it came to interacting with Vax’ildan. True, Vex was on there with him, holding the infant between her legs as Trinket slowly, and painstakingly lumbered through the courtyard. Vax’ildan was thrilled with the experience. He giggled every time they hit a slight bump. Trinket, for his part, was overjoyed just to be apart of the excitement.

‘We are still not letting the bear babysit,’ Percy said, almost reprovingly. Vex had barely even opened her mouth; she certainly hadn’t been going to suggest that Trinket babysit. Just maybe that he could be possibly trusted to not swallow his baby brother whole. She was about to make an indignant retort when she saw the raven in the trees above them. It cawed loudly, startling her. Percy hadn’t even seemed to notice.

Vex could just imagine her brother, standing by her side, giving Trinket a chin scratch, and saying “You’re not going to eat your baby brother are you, Trinket?” and then letting the bear slobber against him for his nephew’s entertainment.

‘Is everything okay?’ Percy asked. Vex realized that she’d been staring off into, the trees, and her cheeks were stained with tears.

‘I—yes,’ she said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. ‘I was just thinking about Vax.’ She sniffed. ‘I wish he could have been here...for the important things.’ And for the not as important things, and every waking moment.

‘I’m sure he’s watching in one way or another,’ Percy said, in that almost uncomfortable sort of voice he had when discussing Gods, or the afterlife. The fact that he did it anyway was almost heartwarming.

‘Yes, I’m sure he is,’ Vex agreed. She looked up into the tree again, and the raven was gone. Perhaps she had just been imagining things. Or, just as likely, had been projecting her own desires onto a perfectly ordinary raven.

In either case, it was a comforting thought, the idea that Vax was keeping an eye on her. That even in death, he was watching her back, the same way they had for each other while he was still alive. Keeping an eye on her, and keeping an eye on his nephew.

Whatever the reason, there were certainly a lot of people around to care and to teach and to love the newest member of the De Rolo family.

Percy could teach him to draw, and to tinker, and to read (properly). Vex could teach him to climb, and hunt, and sneak around in the shadows. When the day came, he would be prepared for whatever path Fate met him with, if it came at all. If he was lucky, his fate would be the same as hers.

She kissed her son on the forehead. She lingered for a few moments, watching his breathing settle. For now, he was happy and safe.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the silhouette of a raven against the crescent moon. It was the same raven that had been at the window downstairs, that had been watching through the window as she gave birth, that had been watching, from a distance for some time. The same raven that Keyleth had mentioned, more than once, and the raven she knew she would see for years to come.

Whether it was him or not, she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to find out, just in case it was not quite the answer she wanted. But for now, it was enough.

When she spoke, it was both to her son, sleeping softly in the crib, and to the raven in the night.

‘Goodnight, Vax’ildan.’


End file.
